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The NBC News headline is "Trump’s voter fraud panel has gone dark. Members don’t know why." But it seems more accurate to say “Democratic members of Trump’s voter suppression panel are being kept in the dark.”
"I have not heard anything since the New Hampshire meeting," the state's 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 nonresponse. "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."
A third Democrat on the commission has actually filed a lawsuit over the information he’s not getting about the group’s work.
Christian Adams, one of three of the commission’s Republican members who got together on a panel at the ALEC conference last month, saying at that event that “the greatest foreign influence in our elections are aliens who are getting on the rolls and aliens who are voting,” had a spokesperson insist that there’s nothing questionable going on—the panel just can’t meet now because of the holidays. No word on the Sept. 12 to Thanksgiving period, even if you consider the entire month of December to be a reasonable Christmas break.
Of course the voter suppression commission was always the intersection of Donald Trump’s pathological need to believe he lost the 2016 popular vote for nefarious reasons and the Republican desire to keep people of color and other likely Democrats from voting. But that’s exactly what’s concerning: Without Trump currently throwing a public tantrum over the millions of illegal votes against him that were the reason he lost the popular vote by millions, the hardcore vote suppressors are free to do their work in secret.