States Rebuff Trump Election Integrity Commission (Audio)

are on the roles. Let's find out how many cases where someone's deceased individuals actually voted. And let's find out how many aliens are on the vote rules. But the request has generated pushback, lots of it. Both Republican and Democratic officials are balking in many cases, saying state law doesn't permit them to turn over that information. With us to talk about the issue, the request are to election

law experts. Nate personally is a professor at Stanford Law School and is with June in our New York studio and Josh Douglas, professor at the University of Kentucky School of Law. Welcome to you both, um, Nate. Let's start with what you just heard Chris kobaks there and the goal he says he's trying to accomplish. Is there any problem with the goal of trying to gather information from

the states about their databases. Well, for the most part, we have a very decentralized electoral system in the US. We not only decentralized down to the state level, but we decentralized further down to the local level. And so a national database of voters does not exist. So what the Kobac Pence Commission is trying to do is unprecedented. Um. The secretaries of State have indicated to Kobac that he the kind of information that he is asking for from

the states. Uh, if they were to provide it would often violate state law because he's asked for a real wealth of information from about the individual voters. I don't think there is a problem legally with assembling a national database of eligible voters per se. But the way he's gone about it is contradictor to some of the state laws. Josh, what is he looking for? Really? Is there another way to do what he says he wants to do without getting all this information? Well, it's not clear what he

really wants to do. UM And that's the problem. And I say it's not clear because although he claims to be seeking evidence of duplicate registrations or or people voting illegally, um, what he's asking for is not the way to do

that um. And so I think, well, a lot of people are concerned about is that he's gonna if he were to obtain this information, he would to learn what we already know, which is that the voter registration rules can be bloated for for normal reasons like people die, people move, um, And that's not evidence of voter fraud.

I think the concerns that he's going to say, well, look we have these bloated registration rules, there's voter fraud here, and that's going to support ever more restrictive voter voting laws. And and that's what I think one of the big

problem woses well, um, Nate. I mean, if what he ends up finding is just we have a whole lot of duplicate registrations, as Josh said, something that uh, you election law experts have known for a long time, but that there is not a whole lot of evidence of you know, actual fraud people actually showing up and saying I want to vote for this dead person. Um, wouldn't

that be a good thing? Well, I think it's you know, if you took yourself out of the politics of the situation and you said, well, what should the United States have a list of eligible voters out there? I don't think that's an inherently bad thing. The problem is that this is not about creating a national list of voters. It's about trying to suss out UH voter fraud and

duplicate voting in the like. And if you look at the request, and those of us in the business of dealing with these voter lists know that they're they're all kinds of reasons that you have these errors. But more importantly that when you match up the types of voter list that Chris Kobac is trying to seek with the national databases dealing with social security or postal addresses or the ones held by the immigration services, that you're going

to have a huge amount of errors. And so you will end up finding out that or suspecting that there's all these illegal voters who are voting, when in reality you've made a lot of mistakes in the matching process. And the way that he has put forth this request of the States indicates that he doesn't understand the complexity of the matching of the lists. Just about thirty seconds. But we can pick up pick up on this based on on what's happened. How much information is Kobak actually

going to end up with from the states. Also far, it sounds like not a lot. I think we're up to forty four states that's said they're not going to comply, at least impart. Six states have not said what they're going to do next um and so this has been a real debacle already from the start. The very first thing this commission has done has really backfired. We're talking about Donald Trump's Election Commission and its letters requesting voter

data from the states. Chris Kobak, the man who signed the letters, said, the commission is seeking only public information. This is publicly available information. The commission is only requesting what any person on the street in California can walk into a county election office and get. So if social Security number is not publicly available, and it is not publicly available in most states, then we aren't requesting it.

That was from an interview on MSNBC. Our guests are Nate Personally, who is an election law expert at Stanford University and Josh Douglas, who was an election law expert at Kentucky University's law school. Josh, one of the complaints about what Chris Kobak is doing is privacy concerns. But if Kobak is just as he's saying, seeking information that's already public, what's the concern there? Well, for one, I think it's off putting to be asked for things like

social Security numbers, military status, detailed voting history um. Uh. Even if that stuff is not public, it's included in the request UM. But more poor Only it's not the case in every state that someone could just walk into the county Klerk's office and UH and obtain this information. Some states charge a fee for the voter file UM. And as we've discussed earlier, elections in America are really decentralized, so it's not about going to uh the state and

asking for this information. Uh. He even admits in that clip you just played that this is all a lot of data is held at the county level, and yet it's being asked for at the state level. So there's a lot of problems with the implementation of this request. Not to mention the privacy concerns in the data that he's asking for. Nate, So, forty four states that includes of course Republican states have said that they won't comply

or they can't comply. Can Kobak do anything besides having Donald Trump trying to tweet them into submission by embarrassing them and saying, what are they trying to hide? So far? This commission does and have any extraordinary power to issue subpoenas or to force them to do anything. And actually, as I understand it, he has admitted as much and says that, look, we're just asking for the data that

they have that's publicly available. Uh. And so I think they're going to have to go back to square one here and figure out how they're going to assemble the database that they care about without relying on the sort of good intentions of the states, because they've they've sort

of had a bit of an uproar here. Um at some point, you know, we have to admit that what this is about is, look, trying to figure out whether the voters who are on the list and people who have voted are some what's you know, some subsection of them are illegal voters the three or five million that President Trump tweeted about it following the election. And that's really what this commission is about, is trying to figure out how many people are illegally on the roles and

maybe heavy illegally voted in the last election. Josh, this commission is at least nominally bipartisan. There are I think at least have been at least three Democratic members of the commission. Um. One of them, the Maryland Deputies Secretary of State Luis Barunda, just resigned. Uh. Can you just just talk about that? Do we do? We know? I? Mr Barunda resigned and is this truly a bipartisan commission

at this point? I don't think we have any information as to why uh Barunda resigned, although there was a little bit of an uproar in the election community when he was named, because it's not clear that he has any election experience whatsoever. Um. But in terms of the broader question about bi partisanship, I don't think that commissions

can be seen as bipartisan at all. Um. Unlike Obama's last commission after the twenty twelve elections, Presidential Commission on the Election Administration, That one was co chaired by Obama's mean election lawyer and Mitt Romney's an election lawyer and had an election expert Nate personally, who everyone sort of agrees is very well respected and by partisan field. Um, here we have Pence in Kobac leading the charts. Both of them obviously have their own political viewpoints. There's no

serious Democrat who has agreed to join the commission. I say serious, and that someone who has a strong election uh experience. I think I think the name of the commission signifies this true purpose. This isn't the Commission on Election Administration. It's Commission on Election Integrity. And that's the only thing that the commission seems to be focused on.

If we're gonna have a serious, five partist commission, it would look at not only election integrity, but the problem of voter suppression as well as issues of voter enhancement to ways of states can and should be making it easier to participate in our elections. So, Nate, let's go back to the executive order that started this thing rolling.

What does that tell us about this Well, A lot of what President Trump's executive order said in establishing this commission is that they want to preserve confidence and promote confidence in the American electoral system. And to some extent, that's a buzzword for those of us in the election administration community, because Uh Quebec and President Trump are right, which is that a lot of people do have a lack of confidence in American democracy and in the way

the voting system works. Democrats right now lack confidence because they think Russians hacked the election. Republicans lack confidence because they think and believe that there was a lot of voter fraud. The problem is that you don't find that' say, restrictive voter i D laws or the like, have any

real effect on promoting voter confidence. And if you start looking at public opinion instead of the actual data about who voted and who may have voted it illegally, you'll get a completely different view as to what the pathologies are in the American electoral system. I want to thank our guests. That was Nate personally talking. He's a professor

at Stanford University Law School. Uh formerly was the senior research director for a truly bipartisan commission set up after the election, and Josh douglasa professor at the Universe A Kentucky School of Law, both election law experts,