Let America Vote Corrects the Record after President Trump Again Made False Claims about Voter Fraud

President Trump today used his platform at the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity meeting to perpetuate the falsehoods that he has used to justify a sham investigation into America’s elections that makes voters’ personal information less safe.

The Democratic National Committee’s Committee to Protect American Democracy from the Trump Administration today met prior to Trump’s meeting for a press conference exposing and discrediting Trump’s effort as an attempt to engineer elections in favor of Republicans.

Jason Kander, President of Let America Vote and Chairman of the DNC’s Commission to Protect American Democracy from the Trump Administration, explained during the press conference that the Trump’s commission’s origin, methods and composition all show its partisan and political nature. Kander noted that the President’s lie that three to five million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election was not disputed by Republican politicians because it advanced their voter suppression agenda. The Trump commission’s request forpolitical party in its sweeping data grab of every American voter’s personal information creates the appearance that Trump aims to know learn how Americans have voted in the past. Finally, the commission’s leaders Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Vice President Mike Pence have proven records supporting measures that deny certain people access to voting.

“Trump’s commission is a danger to democracy that we have to take very seriously,” Let America Vote President Jason Kander said. “The country’s leading voter suppressors have been given a platform to nationalize efforts that have already disenfranchised many of the voters they’re supposed to represent. Let America Vote will not let their lies go unchallenged and we’ll do everything in our power to protect voters.”

Additionally, the following false claims were made during the Trump committee’s meeting:

President Trump: “All public officials have a profound responsibility to protect the integrity of the vote. We have no choice.”

In fact, a 2016 Brennan Center for Justice study found that across 42 jurisdictions, election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 general election referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.

Vice President Pence: “We go into this process with no preconceived notions or preordained results.” 

During the commission’s opening statements, several Republican members—including Vice Chair Kris Kobach—claimed that voter fraud is already a massive problem. The President has also claimed, with absolutely no evidence, that three to five million votes were cast in the 2016 election.

Secretary Kobach spoke at length about his Interstate Crosscheck program and said it “illustrates how successful a multi-state effort can be in enhancing the integrity of our elections and keeping our voter rolls accurate.”

In a study published earlier this year, researchers from Stanford, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Microsoft Research assed the methodology used by Interstate Crosscheck. They wrote, “We find their proposed purging strategy would eliminate about 200 registrations used to cast legitimate votes for every one registration used to cast a double vote.” This is the method that Secretary Kobach and this commission wish to use across the country to disenfranchise legitimate voters in the name of preventing voter fraud.