Last week, one of our nation’s best-known vote suppressors, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, said at the first meeting of what Donald Trump calls the voter fraud commission that we “may never know” who actually won the popular vote in the 2016 presidential race. That generated a few gasps and a rash of head shaking. After all, the official tally gave Hillary Clinton a 2.9 million-vote margin.
But Kobach’s remark as vice chairman of the commission—officially overseen by Vice President Mike Pence as chairman—was soon overwhelmed by objections to the commission’s demand that states turn over private, personal data about voters on their rolls. That demand has been flat-out rejected by 22 states, with 22 others agreeing to provide only limited information already available to anyone who walks in the door and asks for it.
Anyone familiar with Kobach’s efforts to keep people off the voter rolls and purge people already on them was not surprised by his remark. The man was specially picked to be the hands-on chief of the formally named Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity—not for any reputation he has for integrity but specifically because of his long-standing efforts to suppress votes, particularly the votes of Latinos and young people.
With his “may never know” comment and remarks like it, Kobach and others who spread this brazen lie give credence in many Americans’ view to the ridiculous Trump claim that 3 to 5 million people fraudulently voted in the 2016 election, keeping him from winning the popular vote. But the remark and its cousins could do something much worse: They could serve as the greatest vote suppressor since Jim Crow was tossed, half a century ago, by persuading many Americans to believe that they can’t trust election outcomes to reflect how legitimate voters actually cast their ballots. That is the perfect way to spur people to stay home on Election Day, something more than 100 million eligible Americans already do.
As Edward Burmila wrote at today’s Washington Post:
It is tempting, given Trump’s personality, to attribute his repeated claims of widespread voter fraud to the need of a fragile ego to explain away his 3 million vote shortfall in the popular vote, or to chalk it all up to a desire to curtail voting rights for populations who generally don’t vote Republican. But there are further and bigger reasons Trump might pursue the narrative that American voting is hopelessly broken. Trump’s insistence that American elections are beset by voter fraud also contributes to a larger effort to erode what little confidence remains among Americans in the institutions of government. When citizens have no confidence in the government, the party whose central ideological message is “government is bad” benefits.
In a just world, a major focus of such a commission would be an investigation of voter suppression and the inventors of the new Jim Crow, who are determined to shave a few percentage points off Democratic voter turnout and thus give an election advantage to Republicans. This isn’t partisan speculation. Republican operatives from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin have publicly stated this to be their purpose.
In a just world, the commission wouldn’t be seeking personal information on voters that could be used for nefarious authoritarian purposes unrelated to whether a person is registered and voting in more than one place.
In a just world, a commission of real integrity would put forth recommendations for upgrading the nation’s decaying voting machinery, making registration easier or automatic, ensuring every election has an auditable, unhackable ballot trail, promoting mail-in balloting, and creating federal laws that mandate fairness in state voting laws and procedures.
Okay—we don’t live in a just world, and there’s no excuse for being a pollyanna about this. Certainly election cheating is a crucial matter to be guarded against. Although fears have been voiced in the past decade-and-a-half that voting machines have been hacked to give certain candidates an advantage, there’s been no proof this has ever actually happened, either by Russians or Republicans. But it’s apparent that it could be done by skillful, determined operatives, without anyone being the wiser. We need protections against that.
Government mandates for voting software must require that it be designed and voting machines be monitored by people knowledgeable about what to look for. Or, as some reformers have suggested, we should just switch back to paper ballots. If we adopt mail-in balloting across the nation, something some liberals have called for, all elections will be done with paper ballots. But voting machines were originally put in place to eliminate problems of ballot box stuffing when paper ballots were the standard. So real election integrity will always remain something to pay attention to.
And whatever the method for casting and counting ballots, we will continue to face the problem that skews the views of those who cast those ballots: dark money. So far, no commission on that.
Election integrity is crucial to the workings of a democracy. But the president’s advisory commission has nothing to do with that.