National: Trump’s Fraud Panel, No Stranger to Controversy, Creates Another One | The New York Times

President Trump’s commission on voter fraud, which has ricocheted between controversies since its creation in May, is scheduled to hold its second public meeting on Tuesday in New Hampshire. Already, the commission’s de facto leader has warmed up for the session by suggesting that the election in November of Senator Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, was rigged. The accusation led the state’s entire congressional delegation to demand that William M. Gardner, the New Hampshire secretary of state, resign from the commission. Mr. Gardner, a Democrat and the host of the meeting on Tuesday, refused to do so, and said the state’s two senators and two representatives were being hypocritical. Uproar has become standard practice for the fraud panel, officially called the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Critics say the commission is a pretext for Republican efforts to make it harder to register and to vote, and that it will reach a predetermined conclusion, that tough new rules are needed to prevent fraud. Studies have repeatedly shown that illegal voting is very rare, and that voter impersonation — perhaps the main danger suggested by advocates of tighter election rules — is next to nonexistent.

National: Democrat On Trump Voter Fraud Probe Slams Voting Restriction Efforts | HuffPost

A Democratic member of President Donald Trump’s commission to investigate voter fraud issued some of the strongest criticism yet from within the panel on efforts to make it more difficult to vote. In a lengthy statement to the commission, Alan King, a Democratic probate judge in Alabama, criticized overzealous efforts to purge people from the voter rolls. In his statement, King wrote that while there may be some people who voted twice, there were thousands more who were removed from the rolls for no reason or had their vote suppressed. King won’t be attending the panel’s Tuesday meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire, because of a scheduling conflict, he told commission organizers. “The reality is that the less affluent in our society are more prone to move and more prone to have a diminished economic position in life, just to survive. But that does not mean that officials in government should ‘game the system’ to deprive the less affluent from voting, simply because they may have moved from one election to another only to be stricken from the active voter list,” he wrote.

Voting Blogs: Analysis: Heritage Foundation’s Database Undermines Claims of Recent Voter Fraud | Brennan Center for Justice

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity relies on a database produced by the Heritage Foundation to justify baseless claims — by President Trump and some of the panel’s members — of rampant voter fraud. But according to an analysis of the database by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, the numbers in the database reveal exactly the opposite. Claims that the database contains almost 1,100 proven instances of voter fraud are grossly exaggerated and devoid of context, according to Heritage Fraud Database: An Assessment. It confirms what numerous studies have consistently shown: Voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and impersonating a voter at the polls is less common a phenomenon than being struck by lightning. “The database includes an assortment of cases, many unrelated or tangentially related, going back decades, with only a handful pertaining to non-citizens voting or impersonation at the polls,” writes the author. “They add up to a molecular fraction of the total votes cast nationwide. Inadvertently, the Heritage Foundation’s database undermines its claim of widespread voter fraud.

New Hampshire: Gardner rejects call by congressional delegation to step down from Trump election commission | WMUR

A fired up Secretary of State William Gardner Friday flatly refused demands by the four Democratic members of the state’s congressional delegation that he step down from President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission after the panel’s vice chairman questioned the legitimacy of last year’s U.S. Senate race. Gardner, who is also a Democrat, told WMUR the comments by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan and U.S. Reps. Carol Shea-Porter and Annie Kuster are “hypocritical.” “No, I’m not going to step down, and it’s hypocritical to ask me to step down as a member of a federal commission,” Gardner said. “Have they ever stepped down from a Senate committee or a committee that they serve on because they disagreed with someone on the committee?”

New Hampshire: Federal judge sends lawsuits challenging new voting law back to state court | WMUR

Following a weekend of legal maneuvering, a federal judge has sent two lawsuits challenging the state’s controversial new Republican-backed law tightening voter registration requirements back to the state Superior Court, where the claims were initially filed. The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Joseph LaPlante came after attorneys for the New Hampshire Democratic Party and League of Women Voters amended their separate, but almost identical, complaints to remove allegations that the new law violates provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Instead, attorneys for the Democrats and the League said, they have now focused their suits on alleged violations of the New Hampshire Constitution in the law formerly known as Senate Bill 3.

National: Trump fraud commission violated federal rules, lawsuit claims | The Hill

President Trump’s voter fraud commission may have violated federal records laws by using personal email accounts to conduct commission work. The lawsuit brought by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law against the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity states that Justice Department attorneys revealed during a Sept. 1 meeting that commission members have been using personal email accounts rather than federal government-issued accounts to conduct commission-related work. The Verge was the first to report on the latest filing. “Such use of personal email violates the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which Congress amended in 2014 specifically to require that all persons covered by the PRA — including members of this Commission — use official federal government email to conduct government business,” the Lawyer’s Committee argued in a joint status report filed by attorneys for both parties in the suit.

Kansas: In Response To Justice Department, Kobach Cites Voter Database As Key Kansas Resource | HPPR

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is touting a controversial multistate voter database as a key resource in response to U.S. Department of Justice questions about Kansas’ compliance with federal voting law. In a recent letter to the Justice Department, obtained by the Kansas News Service through an open records request, Kobach describes the database as “one of the most important systems” Kansas uses to check the accuracy of voter rolls. … Critics, however, question the program’s value, saying poor data quality means there is far greater potential for mistakenly assuming people with the same name and birthdate to be the same person.

National: Lawyers’ Group: Sketchy Election Panel Using Personal Email For Official Business | TPM

Members of President Donald Trump’s bogus “election integrity” commission vice chaired by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) used personal email to conduct official business, plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the commission claimed Tuesday. The claims appeared in a joint status report filed by both sides Tuesday in the case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Members of the panel “have been using personal email accounts rather than federal government systems to conduct Commission work,” according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which filed suit against the committee in July.

National: Adam Schiff pushes to defund Trump’s voter fraud commission | The Hill

A Democratic lawmaker has introduced an amendment to an upcoming government spending bill that would defund President Trump’s controversial commission on voter fraud. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) announced the amendment in a press release this week that accuses the panel co-chaired by Vice President Pence of “appearing to lay the groundwork for a push to place new restrictions on voting that disproportionately disadvantages minority voters.” “This commission is an effort to validate the President’s repeated and baseless claim that millions of fraudulent ballots were cast in the 2016 election, and I fear it lays the groundwork for new efforts to make it more difficult to vote across the country,” Schiff said in the statement.

National: Judge Nails Trump’s Fraud Commission on Records Handling | Courthouse News

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Trump administration to show more evidence that a new commission tasked with investigating election fraud is complying with public-disclosure laws. The order this morning came as part of a demand by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law for limited discovery after the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity failed to release all of the materials it used during its first meeting on July 19. Despite having promised to release all materials before the meeting even occurred, the commission explained in a July 31 opposition brief that it could not do so because certain commission members did not submit their materials in advance.

New Hampshire: Why Is Bill Gardner Giving Cover To Trump’s Bogus Voter Fraud Panel? | TPM

For four decades, New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner (D) has earned bipartisan reverence for keeping his state’s primaries first in the nation. So why is he spending that hard-earned capital giving bipartisan cover to President Trump’s controversial voter fraud panel? … “I personally wish that he had declined to be involved,” Fergus Cullen, the former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party and a frequent Trump critic, told TPM. “It gives this farce a sense of legitimacy.” … Gardner has said he joined the Trump commission to prove whether or not there’s widespread voter fraud — something he’s much more skeptical of than others on the commission. But many argue that his mere presence fuels the insanity he’s trying to knock down, giving Trump and Kobach bipartisan cover.

National: Trump fraud panel apologizes after judge calls failure to disclose information ‘incredible’ | The Washington Post

A federal judge on Wednesday tore into President Trump’s voter commission for reneging on a promise to fully disclose public documents before a July 19 meeting, ordering the government to meet new transparency requirements and eliciting an apology from administration lawyers. U.S. District Judge Colleen ­Kollar-Kotelly of Washington said the Election Integrity Commission released only an agenda and proposed bylaws before its first meeting at the White House complex last month. But once gathered, commissioners had thick binders that included documents the public had not seen, including a specially prepared report and a 381-page “database” purporting to show 1,100 cases of voter fraud, both from the think tank Heritage Foundation. The group also received a typed list of possible topics to address from the panel vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach.

Editorials: On Voting Reforms, Follow Illinois, Not Texas | The New York Times

In the face of America’s abysmal voter participation rates, lawmakers have two choices: They can make voting easier, or they can make it harder. Illinois made the right choice this week, becoming the 10th state, along with the District of Columbia, to enact automatic voter registration. The bill, which could add as many as one million voters to the state’s rolls, was signed by Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican who had vetoed similar legislation last year. Under the new law, all eligible voters will be registered to vote when they visit the Department of Motor Vehicles or other state agencies. If they do not want to be registered, they may opt out.

Indiana: Secretary of State: No link between early voting access and turnout. Democrats: Get real.| Indianapolis Star

Republican Secretary of State Connie Lawson told a committee of state lawmakers Wednesday that she doesn’t see a correlation between early voting access and voter turnout. The statement comes a few weeks after an IndyStar investigation found that state and local Republicans have expanded early voting in GOP-dominated areas and restricted it in Democratic areas. Common Cause Indiana, the Indiana State Conference of the NAACP and the local NAACP Branch, filed a lawsuit in May against the Marion County Election Board and Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, due to the scarcity of early voting locations in Marion County. In the lawsuit, the organization said the lack of early voting opportunities discriminates against African-American voters and violates the constitution.

Editorials: Kansas’ ballot box has too many locks | The Wichita Eagle

The man who oversees the election office that threw out nearly 14,000 Kansans’ ballots from the 2016 general election is running for governor a year from now. That’s a thought six other Republicans in the gubernatorial primary field – and the Democratic candidates – probably can’t get out of their heads. Secretary of State Kris Kobach is known locally for his work in making it harder for Kansans to vote in the name of eliminating voter fraud – fraud that has been proven in the most infinitesimal numbers. He’s known nationally for that, plus being co-chairman of President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity that was seemingly created to prove Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that he would have won the 2016 popular vote if not for 3 million to 5 million illegal votes.

New Hampshire: Handwritten notes on N.H. voter checklists stall release to Trump fraud panel | Concord Monitor

New Hampshire election checklists being compiled for President Donald Trump’s electoral commission won’t be on their way to Washington anytime soon because they have to be cleaned of some voters’ personal information, including the identity of some potential victims of abuse. Review of the lists of voters compiled by more than 200 different town and city supervisors of the checklist and clerks found 51 polling place checklists from 42 communities “contained handwritten information that was either clearly confidential information or information which is not required for the election day checklist,” according to a memo released Tuesday from Secretary of State William Gardner and Attorney General Gordon MacDonald. “This information includes, among other things, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and telephone numbers.”

Editorials: The Texas Legislature’s persistent discrimination | Ross Ramsey/The Texas Tribune

If somebody you know got stopped seven or eight times for driving drunk, would you think they had a problem? Texas lawmakers have now been popped by federal judges seven or eight times in recent years for intentionally discriminating against minority voters in with voter ID and redistricting legislation. Think they’ve got a problem? The federal government has a program for repeat offenders like Texas; it’s called “preclearance,” and it forces states with histories of official racial discrimination to get their new election and voting rights laws checked by the feds — either the Justice Department or the courts — before those laws can go into effect.

National: Kobach Swipes at Schumer Over Charlottesville | Roll Call

The vice chair of a presidential commission charged with investigating voting fraud swung back at the Democratic leader of the Senate Friday, saying it was “pathetic” that Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer equated the panel with white supremacists and a deadly rally earlier this month in Charlottesville, Virginia. “It’s a pathetic, partisan attempt to wrap Charlottesville around every issue he can think of,” said Kris Kobach, the vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. “It’s complete nonsense.” On Thursday, Schumer, a Democrat from New York, posted a piece on Medium.com calling for President Donald Trump to disband the commission. He also said if Trump failed to do so, Congress should consider attaching riders to “must-pass” legislation in September that would prohibit the panel’s operation.

National: Vote Fraud Crusader J. Christian Adams Sparks Outrage | NBC

J. Christian Adams claims there’s an “alien invasion” at the voting booth. Adams, a member of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission, is dedicating his life to cleaning up registration rolls around the country and trying to prevent non-citizens from casting ballots. To do so, he’s spent years suing counties to force them to purge their rolls and he’s published personal information online about thousands of registered voters he believes could have committed fraud. Adams has turned allegations of sweeping, illegal voting into a career marked by frequent litigation and a bombastic media presence — calling critics who say that there’s no widespread proof of voter fraud “flat-earthers.”

Editorials: President Trump’s ‘election integrity’ panel is a sham | USA Today

As the 2018 and 2020 elections approach, federal and state officials ought to be scrambling for ways to prevent a repeat of Russian interference or other meddling in American democracy. Instead, many are on an obsessive hunt to eradicate phantom problems, such as supposedly massive fraud by non-citizens and people voting in two states. The upshot is that 54 years after Martin Luther King Jr. appealed for voting rights in his “I Have a Dream” speech, those rights remain under a double-barreled assault.

Editorials: Here’s how to fix Indiana’s rigged voting system | Indianpolis Star

Let’s be honest: Republicans have gamed Indiana’s voting system to their advantage. They gerrymandered congressional and legislative districts in their favor after the 2010 Census, helping the party gain supermajorities in the Indiana House and Senate. They’ve also suppressed the number of early voting sites in Democratic areas while encouraging their expansion in counties where Republicans dominate. Consider that in Marion County, population 939,000, voters can cast early ballots at only one location, at the City-County Building in congested Downtown. Republicans repeatedly have blocked proposals to open more voting centers in Indy.

Editorials: Why did Kansas discard nearly 14,000 ballots in the 2016 election? | The Kansas City Star

On Thursday, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York urged the White House to disband its misnamed Election Integrity Commission, whose vice chairman is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Otherwise, Schumer said, he’ll try to block the commission by forcing its demise in an amendment to must-pass legislation, such as an increase in the debt ceiling or a government funding bill. We’re not big fans of using must-pass bills as trees on which to hang unrelated legislative ornaments. But the senator is right to call for the dismantling of the already-discredited commission. The effort to verify President Donald Trump’s claim that millions of Americans voted illegally is a waste of time and money. Instead, Americans should support Schumer’s alternative: public hearings on the status of voting rights.

New Hampshire: Gardner invites Schumer to fraud commission meeting | Union Leader

Secretary of State Bill Gardner has invited Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York to address President Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity when it meets in New Hampshire next month. The invitation comes days after Schumer, in a national opinion column, called on Trump to disband the commission saying it was critical in the wake of the racist march on Charlottesville that turned deadly this month. “We need more than just words – we also need action,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote in an opinion piece first published at Medium. “And I believe that one important way that Congress can begin to heal this painful divide in our country when we return in September is by showing that we can come together to stop the systemic disenfranchisement of American voters.”

Kansas: Uncounted ballots fuel fears about Kobach’s proposals | Associated Press

A conservative firebrand promoting President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud oversees a Kansas election system that threw out at least three times as many ballots as any similarly sized state did, fueling concerns about massive voter suppression should its practices become the national standard. Only six states – all among the top 10 in population – discarded more votes during the 2016 election than the 33rd-largest state of Kansas, according to data collected by the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that certifies voting systems. Kansas’ 13,717 rejected ballots even topped the 13,461 from Florida, which has about seven times as many residents. Critics of Kansas’ election system argue its unusually high number of discarded ballots reflects policies shaped over several elections that have resulted in many legitimate voters being kept off voter rolls in an effort to crack down on a few illegitimate ones.

Editorials: It’s time to start punishing public officials who disenfranchise voters | Catherine Rampell/The Washington Post

In the federal government and in most states, there are consequences when governments deprive Americans of their constitutional right to liberty — through, say, wrongful imprisonment. So why aren’t there more meaningful consequences when states deprive Americans of their constitutional right to vote? Again and again, “voter fraud” has been shown to be virtually nonexistent. Yet in the name of eradicating this imagined scourge, state officials around the country have been systemically and aggressively disenfranchising American citizens. To prevent a handful of votes from possibly being cast illegally, officials purge thousands of eligible voters from state rolls, toss ballots and pass modern-day poll taxes.

Illinois: State officials put off decision on Trump panels request for voter data | Chicago Tribune

The State Board of Elections put off a decision Tuesday on the latest request for Illinois voter information made by a panel formed by President Donald Trump to look into his claims of voting irregularities in last year’s presidential election. Instead, the board is sending a letter requesting more information about the purpose of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Illinois officials also want to know whether any information provided truly could be kept confidential, as the federal panel pledged and as Illinois law requires. The privacy issue is a critical one for state election officials. In early July, the bipartisan elections board rejected an initial appeal for “publicly available” voter data by the federal panel because, under Illinois law, it had no such information available that could be publicly disclosed.

Editorials: Kansas voting no role model / Lawrence Journal World

Reports that Kansas discarded provisional voter ballots in the 2016 election at a rate higher than almost any other state is further proof that Kansas should not be the model to follow in establishing federal election guidelines. Kansas becoming an election model for the country wasn’t a real concern until President Donald Trump appointed Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the architect of Kansas’ voting policies, co-chairman of Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Kobach is the architect of some of the nation’s most restrictive voter registration policies. The requirements to register to vote require extensive documentation and are most burdensome on poor and elderly voters. New data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission show just how effective those policies have been, not only at keeping people from the polls in Kansas, but also challenging their ballots once they do turn out.

New Hampshire: Democratic Party challenges new voter law | Associated Press

The head of New Hampshire’s Democratic Party filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging a new state law that requires voters who move to the state within 30 days of an election to provide proof that they intend to stay. The party contends it presents confusing, unnecessary and intimidating hurdles to voting. Democratic Chairman Raymond Buckley said the law amounts to voter suppression. He’s asking for a judge to declare the law, signed by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu in July, unconstitutional. The lawsuit names Attorney General Gordon MacDonald and Secretary of State William Gardner as defendants. A statement from MacDonald’s office says the law is presumed to be constitutional. “The Department of Justice will defend it vigorously and we are confident it will be sustained,” the statement said.

National: Lawsuit: Trump’s Election Commission Is Hiding Public Information | Rewire

President Donald Trump’s election commission led by voter suppression advocates won’t be able to operate in the dark if a new lawsuit is successful. Trump in May signed an executive order creating the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity,” led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kris Kobach, who as Kansas’ secretary of state was routinely accused of advancing voter suppression efforts. The commission’s stated purpose is to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the 2016 election. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School and the Protect Democracy Project filed a lawsuit Monday in federal court in New York to compel the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of Management and Budget to answer requests and disclose public information related to the commission.

Texas: Seniors push back against mail-in ballot fraud law | TWC

Keeping Texas elections secure: that’s the goal of a new measure lawmakers passed during the special session. But the law has the side effect of repealing a measure meant to make it easier for senior citizens to vote. “The primary purpose of the bill was to address some of the issues with voting by mail,” said Texas Secretary of State Interim Legal Director Caroline Geppert. “That tends to be the area here in Texas where we see more complaints of possible fraud or alleged fraud.” The new law, passed during the special legislative session, increases fines and penalties for tampering with ballots or voting fraudulently.