Why Are Democrats Afraid of the Election Integrity Commission?

I would like to know more about the nature of the injunctions before we can call them wins.
I could see a court saying the right to vote is so vital for our democracy that will not allow this law to be implemented until we determine how the law will impact people.

That would not necessarily be a win... that might just be a judicious Judge.
 
Settling the voter-fraud debate
The integrity of elections should be a bipartisan goal, but it isn’t

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES - - Tuesday, May 16, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

President Trump made good last week on a promise to create a Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, and surely this was a promise kept that everyone could applaud. Who but cheats and frauds doesn’t like clean elections? Who doesn’t want his vote to count, and his vote not be canceled by someone ineligible to cast a ballot? This was something that would surely warm hearts at the Brennan Center for Justice and at the League of Women Voters.

But before a single hearing was called, before the first witness could testify, the commission was judged a fraud by the usual suspects who have never met an election-integrity statute they liked, no matter how reasonable.

The president of the Brennan Center for Justice called it “a sham and a distraction.” The president of the League of Women Voters said the commission was filled with “political ideologues with dangerous agendas.” Still others said it was something to suppress voting by minorities, the poor and the young who would be disposed to vote for Democrats.


Vice President Mike Pence was named to chair the commission, and that was bad enough. On the other hand, two members of the commission will be the Democratic secretary of state of Maine, Matthew Dunlap, and the Democratic secretary of state of New Hampshire, Bill Gardner. But what set liberal knees knocking from New York to Seattle was the appointment as vice chairman of one Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, who is arguably the nation’s most ardent and effective foe of voter fraud.

Mr. Trump invited some of the skepticism with his assertion that as many as 3 million to 5 million fraudulent votes might have been cast last November and that with those illicit votes he would have won the popular vote as well as the vote in the Electoral College. He offered no more evidence than the Democrats loudly asserting that the Russians cooked the result of that presidential election.

Until now, the debate on election fraud has been based mostly on anecdotal evidence and conjecture, which is precisely why the Pence commission is needed. “To make broad statements like, ‘It’s not a problem, it doesn’t exist,’ that is factually impossible to [prove],” Mr. Kobach says. “So, what the commission is going to do is provide facts.”


Academic studies of voter fraud concluded the problem was relatively minor but its surveyors didn’t have access to the federal data the new panel will have. Homeland Security data that lists every legal immigrant and visa holder in the country will be compared against state voter rolls to detect noncitizens who are illegally registered to vote. The panel may inspect the Social Security death master files to ensure that the dead aren’t casting ballots (not only in Chicago, where corpses traditionally retain a lively interest in politics, but everywhere else).

Anecdotes are only anecdotes, but some of them have interesting facts to dispense. Putnam County, Florida, last week purged 16 persons from the voter rolls for voting illegally last November, and there’s a battle in the courts over the outcome of a sheriff’s race decided by exactly 16 votes.

In St. Louis, absentee ballots were used to deny the election of Bruce Franks Jr., an activist in the Black Lives Matter movement, and when he sued the judge ordered a new election. He won the second election with 71 percent of the vote.

Voter rolls can be breeding places for fraud. If, as partisan skeptics argue, there’s no such thing as widespread voter fraud, the new commission can settle the argument once and for all. Such an opportunity to find out should appeal to the skeptics. Or maybe they protesteth too much.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/16/editorial-settling-the-voter-fraud-debate/
 
Tom B said:
Why Are Democrats Afraid of the Election Integrity Commission?
They know that the voter rolls are breeding grounds for potential fraud.

By John Fund — May 14, 2017

Last Thursday, President Trump announced the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate voter irregularities and fraud as well as charges of voter suppression in America. The hysterical criticism of his move lays bare the ideological conflict of visions raging over efforts to improve our election systems.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper declared the notion of a commission “a white power grab” designed to reduce minority voter turnout. It said that appointing Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to be vice chairman of a group examining election integrity was “like Hitler asking Goebbels to help put out the Reichstag fire.” Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said that “the American people should demand that elected officials and election administrators not participate in this phony commission.” Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, labeled the commission “a Trump propaganda factory” designed to justify the president’s January claim that he would have won the popular vote if not for 3 million to 5 million illegal votes cast.

Few people believe that Trump’s estimates of illegal votes paint a realistic picture of the issue, and he offered no evidence for his claim. But if he’s wrong, what is the harm of having the first serious national look at just how big the problem might be? If liberal critics are right that voter fraud doesn’t exist save for trace elements, then the commission will come up empty-handed.

Kobach, who last year became the only state election official with the power to prosecute voter fraud, has already pursued nine cases. In 2015, one Kansas county began offering voter registration at naturalization ceremonies, as Hans A. von Spakovsky and I reported in January at Fox News. Election officials soon discovered about a dozen new Americans who were already registered — and who had voted as non-citizens in multiple elections. Kobach says he suspects there are problems in other states. “There’s never actually been a nationwide effort to look at the scope of voter fraud,” he told CNN’s Erin Burnett in April. “Why wouldn’t we want to collect as much data as possible?”

Indeed, smart liberals are already moving away from the mantra that “there is no voter fraud” to a more nuanced position. They know that it’s likely that if Kobach and his fellow commissioners allow states to examine federal databases of permanent legal aliens, holders of temporary visas, or alien filers of tax returns, they will probably find people who are illegally registered to vote — and voting. Kobach told me in an interview that states have tried to run those databases against their own voter-registration lists for years, but the Obama administration turned down all their requests. “Such a study has never been done before,” he told me.

That knowledge is perhaps behind a subtle shift in the statements of some liberals about Trump’s Election Integrity Commission. Nathaniel Persily served as senior research director of Obama’s Presidential Commission on Election Administration. Note that no one demanded that election officials refuse to serve on this commission. Persily told the liberal website Talking Points Memo that “you will find a good number of non-citizens, ex-felons, dead people, and other ineligible voters who are registered” to vote. But he says that “just because ineligible people are registered does not mean they voted.”

True enough, but it sure makes it easier for political operatives in a close vote to round up folks for some last-minute shenanigans, as in the voter-fraud case in St. Louis. Last year, that city’s aging black political machine used absentee-ballot fraud to steal a Democratic primary for state legislator away from 31-year-old Black Lives Matter activist Bruce Franks Jr. In September, a local judge called a new primary election after irregularities in hundreds of absentee ballots were found. Franks went on to win the new election with 71 percent.

Some 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead.
Leftists have known for a long time that America’s voter-registration lists are breeding grounds for potential fraud. According to a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, one out of eight American voter registrations is inaccurate, out of date, or a duplicate. Some 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. Even though that’s a rich vein of potential mischief for fraudsters, the Obama administration didn’t file a single lawsuit in eight years demanding that counties clean up their voter rolls, as they are required to do by the federal “motor voter” law. In 2009, three Justice Department staffers heard deputy assistant attorney general Julie Fernandez say that the DOJ would not be enforcing that provision of the motor-voter law because it ran counter to the law’s overall goal of “increasing turnout.”

That explains why the Democratic line on the new commission is to combine hysterical attacks with cautionary words that what the commission might find won’t be important anyway. “We already know that our voter rolls have mistakes on them,” Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the liberal Brennan Center, told Talking Points Memo. “There are ways in which we can clean them up that don’t surprise voters and don’t take eligible people off the rolls.”

All well and good. But that doesn’t explain why Democrats have so often opposed just such efforts at the state level or why the Obama administration for eight years played hide-the-ball with the data it did have on potential ineligible voters. When liberals claim that there is no voter fraud, to borrow Shakespeare’s words, they do protest too much. They know that lurking in our archaic election procedures are problems that need fixing. Here’s hoping the new commission — which includes Democratic secretaries of state Bill Gardner of New Hampshire and Matthew Dunlap of Maine — breaks through and conducts a first-ever national look at the problem.

— John Fund is NRO’s national-affairs correspondent.

http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...-trump-democrats-attack-ignore-fraud-evidence
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The entire Democrap platform is based upon "theft, deception, power-and-control".

Democrats fear ALL integrity.
 
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