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Trump on states rebuffing his voter fraud effort: 'What are they trying to hide?'
Story highlights
- "What are they trying to hide?" Trump tweeted
- The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was set up to investigate voter fraud
(CNN)President
Donald Trump called out the nearly 30 states expressing concerns about
the legality of his administration's efforts to investigate voter fraud,
asking what the states might be hiding in a tweet Saturday morning.
"Numerous
states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER
FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide," Trump wrote.
The Trump
administration's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity
sent all 50 states a letter Wednesday requesting data from the their
voting rolls, including the full names of registered voters, dates of
birth, party registration, last four digits of Social Security numbers
and voting history.
But as of Friday afternoon, at least 27 states had publicly expressed reservations
or legal barriers to turning over all of the requested information,
particularly with regard to the privacy of Social Security numbers,
according to a CNN inquiry to all 50 states. Several others, including
South Carolina and Arkansas, had not yet received the letter from
commission Vice Chair Kris Kobach.
Some
state officials also expressed concerns that the request was evidence
of an agenda by the Trump White House and dismissed it as politically
motivated posturing.
"I
have no intention of honoring this request," Virginia Gov. Terry
McAuliffe, a Democrat, said in a statement. "Virginia conducts fair,
honest, and democratic elections, and there is no evidence of
significant voter fraud in Virginia. This entire commission is based on
the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last
November. At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate
Donald Trump's alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to
commit large-scale voter suppression."
Mississippi
Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, said of Kobach's
letter: "My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and
Mississippi is a great state to launch from. Mississippi residents
should celebrate Independence Day and our state's right to protect the
privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes."
Connecticut
Secretary of State Denise Merrill, a Democrat, said she would share
information that is publicly available "in the spirit of transparency"
while also protecting private voter information. But she also criticized
Kobach's track record and expressed concern in an ulterior motive.
"In
the same spirit of transparency, we will request that the commission
share any memos, meeting minutes or additional information, as state
officials have not been told precisely what the commission is looking
for," Merrill said. "This lack of openness is all the more concerning,
considering that the vice chair of the commission, Kris Kobach, has a
lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas."
Kobach,
who is Kansas' secretary of state, backed a national cross-referencing
system to allow states to check their voter rolls for overlaps, which
drew criticisms that the system was too prone to allowing legitimate
voters to be purged from voting systems.
Kobach also fought unsuccessfully in court for the ability to require verification of citizenship on voter registration forms.
Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he wants state governments to
perform the task of wiping voters who have died or moved away off their
voting rolls.
"This sort of thing
is handled at the state level, and the Democrats always claim there's no
election fraud at all," the Kentucky Republican told CNN's Jake Tapper in February. "That is, of course, not true -- election fraud does occur,"
"There's
no evidence that it occurred in such a significant number that would
have changed the presidential election," he added. "And I don't think we
ought to spend any federal money investigating that."
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