Posted on 09/21/2017 10:32:09 AM PDT by jazusamo
If you have no idea what happened at the second meeting of President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in New Hampshire on Sept. 12, I’m not surprised.
Though a horde of reporters attended the meeting, almost all of the media stories that emerged from it simply repeated the progressive left’s mantra that the commission is a “sham.”
Almost no one covered the substantive and very concerning testimony of 10 expert witnesses on the problems that exist in our voter registration and election system.
The witnesses included academics, election lawyers, state election officials, data analysts, software experts, and computer scientists.
The existing and potential problems they exposed would give any American with any common sense and any concern for our democratic process cause for alarm.
The first panel included Andrew Smith of the University of New Hampshire, Kimball Brace of Election Data Services Inc., and John Lott. They testified about historical election turnout statistics and the effects of election integrity issues on voter confidence.
Lott also testified that his statistical analyses show that contrary to the narrative myth pushed by some, voter ID does not depress voter turnout. In fact, there is some evidence that it may increase turnout because it increases public confidence in elections.
In a second panel, Donald Palmer, the former chief election official in two states—Florida and Virginia— testified about the problems that exist in state voter registration systems.
He made a series of recommendations to improve the accuracy of voter rolls, including working toward “interoperability” of state voter lists so that states “can identify and remove duplicate registration of citizens who are registered to vote in more than one state.”
Robert Popper, a former Justice Department lawyer now with Judicial Watch, testified about the failure of the Justice Department to enforce the provisions of the National Voter Registration Act that require states to maintain the accuracy of their voter lists.
He said there has been a “pervasive failure by state and county officials” to comply with the National Voter Registration Act, and complained about the under-enforcement of state laws against voter fraud.
Ken Block of Simpatico Software Systems gave a stunning report on the comparison that his company did of voter registration and voter history data from 21 states. He discussed how difficult and expensive it was to get voter data from many states—data that is supposed to be freely available to the public.
According to Block, “the variability in access, quality, cost, and data provided impedes the ability to examine voter activity between states.”
Yet using an extremely conservative matching formula that included name, birthdate, and Social Security number, Block found approximately 8,500 voters who voted in two different states in the November 2016 election, including 200 couples who voted illegally together. He estimated that “there would be 40,000 duplicate votes if data from every state were available.”
Of those duplicate voters, 2,200 cast a ballot in Florida—four times George W. Bush’s margin of victory in 2000. His analysis “indicates a high likelihood [of] voter fraud” and that there is “likely much more to be found.”
As a member of the commission, I testified about The Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database. That non-comprehensive database has 1,071 examples of proven incidents of fraud ranging from one illegal vote to hundreds. It includes 938 criminal convictions, 43 civil penalties, and miscellaneous other cases.
Heritage is about to add another 19 cases to the database. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg, since many cases are never prosecuted and there is no central source for information on election fraud.
The commission also heard about a report published by Shawn Jasper, the Republican speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. That report stated that over 6,500 individuals in 2016 used an out-of-state driver’s license to take advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration law to register and vote on Election Day.
Despite a law that requires an individual with an out-of-state license to obtain a New Hampshire license within 60 days of establishing residency in the state, only 15.5 percent have done so.
Many have tried to explain this away be saying those voters must all have been college students living in New Hampshire. Perhaps that is true.
But it may also be true that voters from Massachusetts and other surrounding states decided to take advantage of New Hampshire’s law to cross the border and vote in a presidential and Senate race, which were decided by only 3,000 and 1,000 voters, respectively.
Of course, we won’t know the truth of what happened unless we do what should be done, and what the commission’s critics don’t want to be done: investigate these cases.
Finally, the commission heard from three computer experts— Andrew Appel of Princeton University, Ronald Rivest of MIT, and Harri Hursti of Nordic Innovation Labs. Their testimony about the ability of hackers to get into electronic voting equipment and just about every other device that uses the internet (and even those that don’t) was chilling.
As Appel stated, our challenge is to ensure that when voters go to the polls, they can “trust that their votes will be recorded accurately, counted accurately, and aggregated accurately.” He made a series of “technological and organization” recommendations for achieving that objective.
All in all, the Sept. 12 meeting, which was hosted by Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s longtime Democratic secretary of state, was both informative and comprehensive. But anyone who didn’t attend would never know that based on the skimpy and biased coverage it received in the media.
The hearing is evidence of the good work the commission is already doing in bringing to light the problems we face in ensuring the integrity of our election process.
Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative.
Perhaps the media is distracted by Obama’s illegal Trump campaign surveillance and the multiple instances of highly illegal unmasking. /s
Yep, the enemedia seem to be ignoring a lot of news they don’t agree with.
Well there just isn’t enough air time or room on the page to cover something as boring as voter fraud right now.
There are too many hurricanes caused by Global Warming that must be covered.
Purging voter list of dead people would be racist.
Everyone knows that minorities die in greater numbers than white people.
We all have a gut feeling that had voter fraud not happened, Hillary would not have won the popular vote.
Had a routine doctors appointment this morning and had to produce a photo ID twice. Once to check in and again to have blood drawn for lab work. However in my state I could vote without any ID. Go figure.
Most welcome...You’re absolutely right, they pick and choose their “news” reporting.
It is absurd (so absurd I never would have believed it) that students attending colleges in my state who are domiciled elsewhere and paying non-resident tuition get to choose our representatives in Congress, our Senators, how our local governments are run, and who our electors for President and Vice President are.
Perhaps the media is distracted by the Awan Brothers / Debbie Wasserman’s illegal surveillance on ALL of Congress, SCOTUS, and God knows who else, to collect BLACKMAIL MATERIAL FOR THE OBAMA/HITLARY DEEP STATE TO KEEP EVERYONE IN LINE WITH THEIR GLOBALIST AGENDA. /s
These media scumbags and their corporate masters will be beaten. There will be massive election reform and they will not like it. They will also be greatly set back by it.
The only thing these leftist pukes have going for them is the Obama-Clinton era blackmail and coercion they hold over republicans. The effectiveness of their blackmail and coercion will decrease in time.
As Evidence of Election Fraud Emerges
Emerges??? What “evidence”. Delusional Asshole.
Yeah, I mean, can you imagine if a sitting U.S. Senator was on trial for corruption?
Bump!
Vote fraud should be a capital offense. It is a direct attack on the entire body politic.
L
How does an ID, photo or otherwise, prevent voting in 2 States? It might catch you out after the event, but not before. Only an online real time National database can do it, and Good Luck with that.
The corruption of our government begins with our voting system and expands exponentially from there winding up with legislators becoming multi-millionaires in one term.
Bkmk
I think claims of massive voter fraud have been massively exaggerated.
The author quotes numbers from the Heritage Foundation Voter Fraud data base, which shows more than 1,000 prosecutions.
What the author does not tell you is that data base goes back at least 17 years! That’s like 60 prosecutions per year.
Dig down another level and the “evidence” for massive voter fraud is even more bogus. Most of those 1,000 prosecutions were for two things - fraudulent voter registration (with no proof that actual votes were cast) and voter fraud in local elections.
There are thousands of Comments at Free Republic that claim Hillary Clinton received MILLIONS of fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.
That makes no sense to me.
Why would Donald Trump even seek the nomination if that were true?
How many times did Donald Trump speak about stopping voter fraud during the election? My guess: zero, or close to it.
There are 35 states with Republican governors and 34 states with dual house Republican legislatures.
Why would they allow massive voter fraud?
Or, if most voter fraud is concentrated in states like California and New York, why would illegal immigrants risk committing a felony since Democrats can easily win almost every election in those states without any illegal votes at all?
Bottom Line:
Democrats have enough LEGAL voters to win any national election they want to, as long as they get their core voters to the polls.
The only advantage Republicans have is that the percentage of white Conservatives who turn out to vote is higher than any other ethnic or political group.
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