National: How the Threat of Exposure Killed Trump’s ‘Voter Fraud’ Commission | WhoWhatWhy

Was President Donald Trump’s controversial “election integrity” commission shut down because its secret inner workings and true purpose were about to be exposed? In an exclusive interview with WhoWhatWhy, Matt Dunlap, one of the few Democrats on the commission and the man who successfully sued for internal documents to be released, says he believes the answer is “yes.” Though Dunlap, Maine’s Secretary of State, was appointed to the commission, he was denied access to documents and kept in the dark about its work after he criticized the tactics of its vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Kobach is an architect of many voter suppression measures and has perpetuated the myth that there is a “voter fraud epidemic.” Shortly after Dunlap won a lawsuit on the issue, and a court ruled that he has a right to the information, Trump pulled the plug on the commission. The Department of Justice then notified Dunlap that, as a result, it would no longer provide him with access to the documents. Undeterred, Dunlap says he’ll continue fighting on behalf of the public’s right to this information, even if it means heading back to court.

New Hampshire: Meet Bud Fitch, New Hampshire’s new vote fraud czar. | Slate

From the beginning of its brief, nonillustrious existence, Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission had a special connection to New Hampshire. Trump launched the commission to justify his claim that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election, many of them in the Granite State. He placed New Hampshire’s Democratic Secretary of State Bill Gardner on the panel to give the group a phony patina of bipartisanship. The commission also traveled to the state for its second and last meeting, an acrimonious affair during which co-chairman Kris Kobach defended his false allegation that thousands of illegal votes swung the vote in New Hampshire in 2016.

Editorials: A few words on the difficulty of voting while black | Leonaard Pitts Jr./Miami Herald

A few words on the difficulty of voting while black. As we mark what would have been his 89th birthday, it seems fitting to recall that Martin Luther King spoke to that difficulty in a 1957 speech whose words ring relevant 61 years later. “All types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters,” lamented King. As he saw it, neither political party was blameless. He castigated Democrats for capitulating to the rabid racists of their Southern wing — the so-called “Dixiecrats” — and blasted Republicans for caving in to “rightwing reactionary Northerners.” “Both political parties,” he said, “have betrayed the cause of justice.”

National: White House says it will destroy Trump voter panel data, send no records to DHS | The Washington Post

State voter registration data collected by President Trump’s abandoned election fraud commission will be destroyed and not shared with the Department of Homeland Security or any other agency, a White House aide told a federal judge. White House Director of Information Technology Charles Herndon also said in a legal filing in Washington late Tuesday that none of the controversial panel’s other “records or data will be transferred to the DHS or another agency” from this point on, except for disclosure or archiving that a court or federal law might require. Herndon’s declaration left unclear what other information the panel may have assembled since its formation in May, if any analysis was done and whether information had already been shared with others outside the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, according to lawyers who participated in a telephone conference call with the court Wednesday.

National: Judge ends consent decree limiting RNC ‘ballot security’ activities | Politico

After more than three decades, Republicans are free of a federal court consent decree that sharply limited the Republican National Committee’s ability to challenge voters’ qualifications and target the kind of fraud President Donald Trump has alleged affected the 2016 presidential race. Newark-based U.S. District Court Judge John Michael Vazquez ruled in an order released Tuesday that the longstanding decree ended Dec. 1 and will not be extended. The decree, which dated to 1982, arose from a Democratic National Committee lawsuit charging the RNC with seeking to discourage African-Americans from voting through targeted mailings warning about penalties for violating election laws and by posting armed, off-duty law enforcement officers at the polls in minority neighborhoods.

Editorials: Donald Trump’s Racist Voter Fraud Charade Isn’t Dead Yet | Sherrilyn Ifill/Newsweek

President Donald Trump’s slapdash commission on election integrity, which he disbanded earlier this week, exists now only in the dustbin of history. But we should not assume that his administration’s attacks on voters of color are over. Beginning during his campaign, Trump has consistently peddled the odious narrative that voters of color are cheaters. During a rally before a nearly all-white audience in rural Pennsylvania, the then-candidate encouraged his supporters to “go down to certain areas” in the state to ensure “other people don’t come in and vote five times.” Many took that to mean African-American voters in places like Philadelphia, a majority-minority city and county that voted overwhelmingly against Trump.

National: Trump’s voter commission is dead, but critics worry its mission may live on | The Washington Post

President Trump may have killed his panel probing allegations of widespread voter fraud, but the controversy surrounding its mission appears destined to continue. Upon issuing an executive order last week terminating the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — which met only twice and faced a flood of lawsuits — Trump said he had asked the Department of Homeland Security to take a look at the panel’s work and “determine next courses of action.” Boosters of the commission, including its vice chairman and driving force, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), are pushing for the DHS to focus on using data that the department collects on citizenship to ferret out illegal voters on state voting rolls.

Editorials: I was on Trump’s fraud commission. Its demise was inevitable. | Matt Dunlap/The Washington Post

It didn’t surprise me when I got an email from the White House on Wednesday night that President Trump had moved to dissolve the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The move came without warning, but given how incredibly dysfunctional the process had been from the start, dissolution was inevitable. Twelve days earlier, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that as a member of the commission, I am entitled to share in the work of the commission and to know when and where we were meeting, what communications we were having and what the commission was working on. That shockingly obvious conclusion came only after I filed a lawsuit to get answers to those very basic questions. The demise of the commission was inevitable simply because the voter-fraud vampire hunters on the panel and in the White House prioritized a desired result of the commission’s work above any sense of process. It didn’t matter that evidence of actual voter misconduct is incredibly rare anywhere in the United States; we’ve all heard the ghost stories, and the Trump administration’s solution was to find those ghosts and exorcise them.

National: Trump Disbands Commission on Voter Fraud | The New York Times

President Trump on Wednesday abruptly shut down a White House commission he had charged with investigating voter fraud, ending a brief quest for evidence of election theft that generated lawsuits, outrage and some scholarly testimony, but no real evidence that American elections are corrupt. On Thursday, Mr. Trump called for requiring voter identification in a pair of Twitter posts because the voting system “is rigged.” “Push hard for Voter Identification!” Mr. Trump wrote. Mr. Trump did not acknowledge the commission’s inability to find evidence of fraud, but cast the closing as a result of continuing legal challenges. … In fact, no state has uncovered significant evidence to support the president’s claim, and election officials, including many Republicans, have strongly rejected it.

National: Trump fraud investigation’s fate unclear after move to DHS | The Hill

The work of investigating President Trump’s claim that millions of people voted illegally in the last presidential election and cost him the popular vote — an idea he’s presented without providing any evidence — now lies in the hands of officials at the Department of Homeland Security, after Trump disbanded the commission originally charged with the investigation. Trump dissolved the controversial Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity late Wednesday and turned its work over to DHS “rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. Trump’s decision comes after the commission grappled with data security concerns and widespread opposition from state governments, including both Democrats and Republicans, who refused to fulfill the commission’s wide-ranging requests for voter data. 

National: A Dead Simple Algorithm Reveals the True Toll of Voter ID Laws | WIRED

After announcing the closure of his short-lived commission to end voter fraud, President Trump made it clear Thursday that he wants more states to require identification at the ballot box to prevent what he believes is rampant—but still unproven—election rigging. Ever since the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, laws requiring voters to show identification when they vote have speckled the nation, popping up in states from Rhode Island to Arizona. Almost as quickly, voting rights advocates have taken states like Texas and Alabama to court, arguing that these laws intentionally discriminate against minority voters. Just last summer, a federal judge tossed out Texas’s voter ID law, in a case that’s now being revisited by an appeals court. But proving exactly how discriminatory these laws are requires far more complexity than it might seem.

Editorials: Trump will still yell about voter fraud, but at least his clownish election commission can’t do any lasting damage | Richard Hasen/Los Angeles Times

President Trump’s precipitous decision Wednesday to shutter his “election integrity” commission — buried amid a slew of revelations from Michael Wolff’s new tell-all book about the Trump campaign and presidency — is good news for Americans who care about fair elections in the United States. Though Trump’s tweets Thursday about voter fraud and his announcement that he will shift the commission’s investigation to the Department of Homeland Security means he won’t let go of the issue, the greatest immediate danger to voting rights seems to have passed. Trump has long made irresponsible and wildly unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud. Before the election, he suggested that there was a great deal of voter impersonation fraud occurring in areas full of poor and minority voters, despite incontrovertible evidence that voter impersonation fraud almost never happens.

Editorials: Trump’s explanation for shutting down his voter fraud commission is just as untrue and partisan | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

President Trump’s efforts to root out voter fraud in the 2016 election were always a charade. Before Election Day, he offered dire warnings in his campaign speeches about voters near Philadelphia (winkwinkwinkwink) and in other places who were voting illegally. His campaign put together a halfhearted poll-watching system, encouraging supporters to blow the whistle on apparent fraudulent activity at the polls. Then, unexpectedly, Trump won Pennsylvania, and his claims of fraud in the Keystone State vanished from his portfolio faster than an Atlantic City casino. Instead, he found new targets: California — a state which, by itself, made up the vote margin by which Trump lost the popular vote — and New Hampshire, a state he narrowly lost. In Michigan, the closest state of the cycle, Trump wasn’t worried about fraud having been a factor; his lawyers declared in a court filing in that state opposing a recount that “All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”

National: Trump scraps his widely denounced ‘election integrity’ commission | The Guardian

Donald Trump has scrapped his advisory commission on “election integrity”, ending an initiative that was widely denounced by civil rights groups as a thinly veiled attempt to suppress the votes of poor people and minorities. A White House statement released on Wednesday evening said that Trump had signed an executive order dissolving the commission. The president put the blame for the panel’s failure on the many states that refused to co-operate with it by handing over voters’ sensitive personal data including name, address, party affiliation and voting history to the inquiry. … After he won the presidential election in November 2016, Trump claimed that at least 3m illegal votes had been cast – the same number by which he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. That claim has never been substantiated, and in fact studies have found that more people are struck by lightning each year or attacked by sharks than are accused of election fraud.

National: Trump disbands fraud commission let by Pence, Kobach | The Kansas City Star

President Donald Trump has dissolved a commission intended to investigate voter fraud after a massive data request by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach led to a backlash from state officials across the political spectrum. The White House announced the dissolution of the panel late Wednesday, citing resistance from states about complying with the commission. Kobach, the commission’s vice chairman, had sought personal information on every voter in the nation in June, a massive data request that spurred multiple lawsuits and backlash from state officials from across the political spectrum. Many states had refused to comply with the request, citing privacy concerns, and even Kansas could not legally provide the commission with partial Social Security numbers as Kobach requested.

Kansas: Court Fight Over Kansas Voting Rights Will Exclude Some Evidence | KCUR

The fight over whether Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach violated the constitution in his quest to demand proof of citizenship from voters goes to trial, with a ruling Wednesday that could complicate his case, in March. A federal judge tossed aside some testimony Kobach had hoped to present in his long-running contention that voter fraud is commonplace. The decision came the same day President Donald Trump scrapped a commission, led by Kobach, designed to document what both men have said is widespread cheating at the polls. In a statement, the White House said states were refusing to cooperate with the commission’s work. The panel also faced numerous lawsuits from civil rights groups.

National: Kobach fraud commission, stalled by lawsuits, will meet in January | The Topeka Capital-Journal

President Donald Trump’s controversial commission on election integrity should meet again in January after being delayed for months because of eight lawsuits demanding its staff’s time, the group’s de facto leader, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, said this week. … Eight lawsuits sit in federal court opposing the commission from plaintiffs including one of the commission’s own members and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “I’m not aware of any presidential commission that has encountered so much litigation from special interest groups,” Kobach said. Kobach said his commission hasn’t met since September, largely because of that litigation.

Maine: Election Chief Shines Light On Fraud Panel He Was Accused Of Legitimizing | Maine Public

A federal judge has ruled that President Donald Trump’s election fraud commission must share correspondence and other documents with one of its Democratic members, Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap. Dunlap sued the panel in November after asserting that its conservative members had stopped providing him information about its work. The ruling is a big victory for Dunlap, who was criticized by fellow Democrats and voting rights advocates for agreeing to join a commission that some worry will be used to nationalize voter suppression efforts. Dunlap says he has no idea what his conservative colleagues on the president’s election fraud panel have been up to for the past several months. And he says he’s not sure what documents may come his way now that a U.S. District Court judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered the commission to provide full access to its working papers.

Maine: Judge backs Maine secretary of state in lawsuit against Trump fraud panel | Portland Press Herald

A federal judge has ruled that Maine’s Secretary of State can’t be excluded from participating in the work of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, on which he serves. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling Friday in Washington, D.C., largely agrees with Matthew Dunlap’s argument that as a member of the commission he must be given access to substantive commission documents. The opinion says Dunlap should have been granted access to documents such as a request for voter data sent to U.S. states and meeting agendas. Dunlap said in a statement that the ruling is “a clear vindication of what I have fought for.”

National: Appeals court rejects challenge to Trump fraud panel | Reuters

A U.S. appeals court in Washington on Tuesday upheld a lower court’s decision to allow President Donald Trump’s commission investigating voter fraud to request data on voter rolls from U.S. states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) watchdog group, which filed the lawsuit, did not have legal standing to seek to force the presidential commission to review privacy concerns before collecting individuals’ voter data. EPIC had argued that under federal law, the commission was required to conduct a privacy-impact assessment before gathering personal data. But the three-judge appeals court panel ruled unanimously that the privacy law at issue was intended to protect individuals, not groups like EPIC. “EPIC is not a voter,” Judge Karen Henderson wrote in the ruling.

National: Court: Trump fraud commission must give Democrat member more access | Politico

President Donald Trump’s commission investigating voter fraud must give one of its Democratic members access to more of the panel’s records, a federal judge ruled Friday night. U.S. District Court Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap appeared to have been denied documents needed to be an active player in the deliberations of what is formally known as the President’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. “Plaintiff has a right, as a commissioner, to ‘fully participate’ in the proceedings of the Commission. In the Court’s view, his assertion that he will be unable to fully participate without the information contained in relevant documents that the Commission has not shared with the public has merit,” wrote Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.

National: Trump’s fraud panel has gone dark. Members don’t know why. | NBC

No one seems to know what’s going on lately with President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission — not even its own members. “I have not heard anything since the New Hampshire meeting,” New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner told NBC News, referring to the commission’s Sept. 12 gathering, the panel’s most recent. Alan King, another Democrat serving on the commission, said he can’t even get his emails answered. “It’s my understanding that this commission is supposed to submit its recommendations in March 2018,” said King, the chief election official in Jefferson County, Alabama, adding that he was frustrated by the non-response. “I’m wondering when you take a two-and-half-month hiatus from meeting…I obviously think anyone would have concerns how a deadline like that is supposed to be met.”

Wisconsin: Professor says voters confused over ID law | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin voters don’t have a good handle on what types of identification they can use to cast a ballot, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor on Tuesday told the state Elections Commission. That’s one takeaway professor Ken Mayer reached after releasing a survey in September about how the state’s voter ID law affected turnout in last year’s presidential election in Milwaukee and Dane counties.  “We found substantial evidence that most voters don’t have good information, accurate information, about the voter ID requirement,” Mayer told the Elections Commission. His study estimated 16,800 voters in those two counties did not vote because of the voter ID law. The $55,000 study — paid for by property-tax payers in Dane County — covered the state’s Democratic strongholds, but not other parts of the state. 

Editorials: The Alabama Senate Race May Have Already Been Decided | Scott Douglas/The New York Times

The Senate election in Alabama on Tuesday is not just about the choice between Doug Jones and Roy Moore. It’s also about a voter suppression campaign that may well sway the result of a close race. In 2011, Alabama lawmakers passed a photo ID law, ostensibly to combat voter fraud. But “voter impersonation” at polling places virtually never happens. The truth is that the lawmakers wanted to keep black and Latino voters from the ballot box. We know this because they’ve always been clear about their intentions. A state senator who had tried for over a decade to get the bill into law, told The Huntsville Times that a photo ID law would undermine Alabama’s “black power structure.” In The Montgomery Advertiser, he said that the absence of an ID law “benefits black elected leaders.”

National: Trump’s fraud commission plans to create a massive voter database. Former national security officials say it could be hacked. | The Washington Post

More than a half-dozen technology experts and former national security officials filed an amicus brief Tuesday urging a federal court to halt the collection of voter information for a planned government database. Former national intelligence director James R. Clapper Jr., one of the co-signatories of the brief, warned that a White House plan to create a centralized database containing sensitive information on millions of American voters will become an attractive target for nation states and criminal hackers. This summer, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity issued a sweeping request to state officials to submit voter data to “analyze vulnerabilities and issues related to voter registration and voting.” The commission, which is chaired by Vice President Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), was established after President Trump claimed that he would have won the popular vote if not for as many as 5 million illegally cast ballots. State officials haven’t found any indication that there was widespread voter fraud.

Louisiana: Panel collects feedback on voter rights | WAFB

From voting rights for former felons to how election resources are spread out across the state, people sounded off on how they think elections in Louisiana could be improved. They spoke before the Louisiana Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which held its second meeting at the state capitol Wednesday. The panel’s goal is to collect input from across the state about barriers some people face to accessing the voting booth. That information will then be passed along to the federal commission, which will compile it with input from other states to create a national report. “If we’re going to be true to no taxation without representation, I think everybody in this country needs to be able to vote,” Norris Henderson told the panel. He’s the executive director of Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), an organization founded and run by former prisoners.

National: Lawyers for Trump election commission respond to lawsuit | Union Leader

Attorneys for President Donald Trump’s commission on election fraud maintain that Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap has no legal right to commission-related documents he is seeking through a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Commission attorneys responded on Friday to a lawsuit filed by Dunlap, aimed at finding out what’s been going on with the commission in the months since its September meeting at St. Anselm College. New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, also a member of the commission, says he hasn’t heard a word from Chairman Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, or any commission staff since the meeting, even though state officials have reached out in an attempt to submit the requested voter data.

Editorials: I’m on Trump’s voter fraud commission. I’m suing it to find out what it’s doing. | Matthew Dunlap/The Washington Post

On Nov. 9, I filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Washington, seeking to obtain the working documents, correspondence and schedule of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. What’s remarkable about my lawsuit is that I’m a member of the commission, and apparently this is the only way I can find out what we’re doing. The commission was formed in May to answer monster-under-the-bed questions about “voter fraud,” but the implicit rationale for its creation appears to be to substantiate President Trump’s unfounded claims that up to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016. Chaired by Vice President Pence, the commission has the chance to answer questions about potential fraud and to highlight best practices to enhance voter confidence in our election systems. Yet it isn’t doing that. Instead, the commission is cloaking itself in secrecy, completely contrary to federal law. Recommendations for changes in public policy — whether you agree with them or not — ought to come through an open, public discussion where any American can weigh in.

National: Court Order Barring RNC From Voter Intimidation Set to Expire Friday | Bloomberg

A 35-year-old federal court order prohibiting the Republican National Committee from engaging in voter verification and other “ballot security” measures is set to expire Friday, something the GOP says is long overdue but voting rights advocates argue is still needed to prevent intimidation at the polls. Lawyers for the Republican National Committee said in court filings that the organization has been in compliance for years, even going beyond what is outlined in the consent decree. It opts against participating in poll-watching activities, for example, even though they are allowed under the order. “The RNC has worked hard to comply with its obligations under the Consent Decree,” lawyers wrote in documents filed with the court.

Illinois: Lawmakers tackle controversial voter registration system | Associated Press

Democratic state lawmakers are introducing a plan to halt Illinois’ participation in a controversial multi-state voter registration database. It’s the latest move after efforts to persuade the State Board of Elections failed. The plan unveiled Thursday would remove Illinois from the Kansas-run Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program. Voter groups argue Crosscheck isn’t secure and could lead to voter suppression elsewhere. They also raise questions about Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who oversees Crosscheck and is a chairman of President Donald Trump’s election fraud commission.