To its credit, the Trump administration is trying to get to the bottom of the voter fraud issue. President Trump has established an Election Integrity Commission headed by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. The commission has requested publicly available data on voter registrations from the states, and, despite the seemingly innocuous nature of the request, a number of states have refused to cooperate.
One of them is Minnesota. The Star Tribune reports:
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said Friday that he won’t fulfill a request from a presidential panel to ship voter registration information for some 4 million Minnesota voters to Washington.
Simon questioned both whether Minnesota law would allow him to provide the information to President Trump’s Election Integrity Commission and to what end it would be used.
Why would Minnesota law preclude responding to the federal commission’s request? If you keep reading, you find that it wouldn’t:
Minnesota law limits the purposes for which voter data can be purchased and used. The law specifically allows data to be provided for political purposes and law enforcement. If it were the Department of Justice requesting the information, Simon said, “we might be having a different discussion.”
So a political party can buy the Minnesota data, but Secretary of State Simon won’t give it to a federal commission. Simon admits that his objection isn’t really legal:
Simon doesn’t dispute the public nature of some of the data — just the purpose and the motives of the commission. “It sure doesn’t look to me like an objective investigation based on who’s running it and what they’ve already said,” Simon said.
Simon noted that Pence and Kobach have publicly supported Trump’s claims that millions of votes were illegally cast in the recent presidential election. The claims of massive voter fraud usually raise the specter of voting by dead people, felons and immigrants.
Not immigrants, but non-citizens. Simon’s final argument is even sillier:
Simon also said the commission is ignoring the real challenge to election integrity: the threat of cyberattacks by outside forces.
Democrats purport to be horrified by Russian “meddling” in our election that didn’t change a single vote, but they have no qualms about meddling by illegal voters, presumably because they think it helps them.
The Election Integrity Commission is trying to find out how much illegal voting goes on. The Democrats constantly tell us there is no, or virtually no, voter fraud. If that were the case, one would think that they would want to cooperate with the commission to prove their point. The fact that they don’t want the commission to be able to find out, for example, how many people are registered voters in multiple states, suggests that what they really want is for voter fraud to continue, because they know they benefit from it.
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