What Trump’s election commission could do
It may have sounded like a simple undertaking that wouldn’t attract much attention and might advance a worthy purpose: Set up a presidential commission on election integrity, ask for relevant data from the states, identify specific problems and offer solutions. But when President Donald Trump tried it, he found the effort is not as easy as he might have hoped.
The panel burst into the news when it asked states to provide “publicly available voter data as permitted under their state laws,” which doesn’t sound alarming. Vice Chairman Kris Kobach said, “Whatever a person on the street can walk in and get, that’s what we would like.” Included in the information it would like to get about registered voters are what elections they’ve voted in, any felony convictions, and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.
If this data is already public, it’s hard to see why it shouldn’t be furnished to a presidential commission. And 20 states promptly agreed to share at least some of the information.
Some secretaries of state perceived a grave affront. Louisiana’s Tom Schedler, a Republican, denounced the request as “federal intrusion and overreach.” Responded Mississippi’s Delbert Hosemann, another Republican, “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”
Some of this pushback looks like old-fashioned distrust of Washington. Some of it looks like grandstanding. But some of it stems from legitimate questions about the whole point of the exercise. California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat, said his “participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud.”
The panel arose after Trump charged that at least 3 million people voted illegally last year, costing him the popular vote. That claim is conspicuously devoid of persuasive evidence. Prosecutions for illegal voting are extremely rare, and the idea that it’s common — much less common enough to affect outcomes — appears to be a fantasy.
But it’s also a mistake to think there is no problem to address. The Pew Center on the States reported in 2012 that nationally, the voting rolls included 1.8 million dead people and some 3 million people registered to vote in more than one state.
Those numbers don’t translate into equivalent amounts of illegal voting, but they do suggest the need to rid the lists of ineligible voters. A few shoplifters filching packs of gum won’t affect Walmart’s bottom line, and a few illegal ballots won’t decide an election, but those facts are no argument for ignoring such conduct. A presidential commission could be a force for overdue improvements, such as getting states to share more information.
But that type of progress is likely to come only from the right kind of panel — one that is truly independent, bipartisan and respected. This one falls short in some crucial ways. The chairman and vice chairman — Vice President Mike Pence and Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state — are Republicans who may reasonably be suspected of doing the president’s bidding, regardless of the facts.
It lacks prominent Democrats, who could lend a useful viewpoint and greater credibility. Its records will be kept in the White House rather than the General Services Administration, as the president originally said, raising fears of who will have access to them and how they will be used.
If the administration were willing to broaden the panel to ensure its independence, tighten its privacy safeguards and address reasonable complaints from state officials, it would have a better case for proceeding. Done right, the project could lead to worthwhile changes on a matter of some importance. It’s not too late to do it right.
In the month after the start of World War II, Winston Churchill said he couldn’t determine what Russia was going to do: “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Nearly eight decades later, the same can be said about the Trump administration’s relationships with Russia.
Since Friday, when President Donald Trump held his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the president and his spokesmen have offered conflicting and contradictory accounts of what was said and agreed to.
Among the big unanswered questions: What happened to the joint cyber-security agreement Trump said had been reached? Were U.S. sanctions against Russia brought up or not? Those riddles quickly got swallowed up by a bigger mystery: Trump arrived home Saturday evening as The New York Times was reporting that in June 2016, his eldest son, son-in-law and thencampaign manager had secretly met with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. Donald Trump Jr. claimed the meeting was about Russia’s ban on adoptions by U.S. families.
It got worse. On Sunday the Times reported that Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had been lured to the meeting with a promise that the lawyer had potentially damaging information about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Trump Jr. quickly changed his story, admitting that dirt on Clinton had been brought up, but there was nothing “meaningful” in what the Russian lawyer presented.
A third shoe dropped Monday evening when the Times reported that the meeting was arranged after Trump Jr. got an email from a well-connected Moscow music publicist saying lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya had information that was part of a Russian government scheme to help Trump’s candidacy by hurting Clinton’s.
Then on Tuesday morning the Times published the text of publicist Rob Goldstone’s email: “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Did Trump Jr. call a lawyer or the FBI? No, he hit reply: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
This meeting was June 9, 2016. The following month, the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies began investigating Russian election meddling. In October, the U.S. intelligence community said it was confident the Russian government was behind the cyber-hacking campaign.
President Trump responded by denigrating the intelligence community — most recently last week in Poland — and firing FBI director James Comey, who had refused to drop the investigation. The president and his spokesmen consistently have denied that anyone in the Trump campaign cooperated with the Russians.
Trump Jr. said Monday that he’d be happy to talk about all of this with the Senate Intelligence Committee. As soon as he’s under oath, the first question must be, “How much of this did you tell your father?”
FEmail letters to the editor to romenewstribune@RN-T.com or submit them to the Rome News-Tribune, 305 E. Sixth Ave., Rome, GA 30162. Nate Beeler, The Columbus Dispatch