Trump Creates New Voter Fraud Commission (Audio)

weren't eligible to vote, particularly undocumented immigrants, cast ballots. We're going to protect the integrity of the ballot box, and we are going to defend the votes of the American citizens so important. Many top democratic and civil rights leaders have charged at the effort to clap down on alleged voter fraud is intended to suppress voter turnout among minorities, the poor, and the elderly by putting up new barriers

to voting. Trump has named Vice President Mike Pence as chairman of the Commission, and Chris Koback, the Kansas Secretary of State known for advocating for the strictest voter i D laws in the country as vice chairman. Joining us our election law experts, Nate Personally, Professor It's Stanford Law School, and Richard Refault, Professor at Columbia Law School, Nate, you were the research director on the Presidential Commission on Election

Administration after the election. Tell us about any real evidence of widespread voter fraud. Well, there isn't widespread evidence of voter fraud. There are any number of irregularities in our election system, um coming from you know, machines that don't work, voters who are wrongly put on the registered registration rolls, dead people on the rolls, people who move. So there are all kinds of problems with our election administration system,

but there is no widespread evidence of fraud. Rich. This commission is being built by the White House at least as a bipartisan commission. There are at least two Democrats on it. What do you think is that? Is this going to be an even handed look at America's election laws? Well, it's not really being set off that way, uh As Natean knows his experience, Nate was the research director of the last major commission that looked into the election administration

system in the US. Typically, these commissions have two chairs, and one of a prominent senior Democrat and one of a prominent senior Republican. So there was the Carter Baker or Baker Carter, Jimmy Carter and James Baker's Republican Secretary State the one that Nate was on, the Power Ginsburg. They were the top election lawyers of their two different parties. This is one of the top two figures of both Republicans.

The Vice President, Mike Pences the chair, and I believe Chris Koback supposed to be the vice chair, and he not only is the partisan, but he has taken a very um strident efficacy position on a lot of election issues. So there may be some Democrats on the commission. I think the full membership has not been announced, but it is certainly not being set up in the the bipartisan way that passed. The commissions that have looked into election

leader issues have been Nate. We know that Senate Majority Leader Mitch Connell set in February that no federal money should be spent investigating voter fraud. Doesn't the commission need professional staff with experience dealing with election administration and resources to examine any credible evidence? I mean, don't you need to put money into this commission? They will put money

into the commission. I mean, I've looked at the Executive Order and it you know, suggests that they'll have all the support from the General Services Administration, and Chris Koback went on the air last night and said that their plan is to match up the voter lists with other lists that the federal government has about green card holders and other citizenship databases in order to see how many non citizens and ineligible voters are on the roles that

may have voted in the last election. And so this will actually be a relatively expensive effort as these things go. I mean, we the Presidential Commission that I served under UM actually was was very frugal I think, I mean there was less than half a million dollars we ended up spending, and that was mainly just to have hearings around the country. Uh So this commission, yeah, it's a it's a real research effort if they undertake a real

research effort. One thing I would also note that there's no UM concluding date for the commission, So this commission could be there for a while, perhaps looking into what happens in the two thousand eighteen election as well. Rich And but just about thirty seconds right now, But what's the scope of this commission? Is it going to look into allegations of votes suppression as well as allegations of voter fraud. It'should be not in the mandate of the charge.

The mandate is all about election fraud and voter integrity, improper voter registration and improper voting. I think if you wanted to, you could squeeze it in because the mission talks about looking at rules and practices that enhance the people American people's confidence in the integrity of the electoral system and that undermine it. And you could argue that vote suppression devices undermine the integrity. So if somebody really wanted to push for looking at those voter suppression issues,

they they could be stated within. But the overall tenor of the mission on the key terms and it all seems to be focused on concerns about voting registration and voting by people who should not be voting, as opposed to mechanisms that make it harder for people who are entitled to vote to actually vote. Coming up on Bloomberg law, what about the timing of this commission? And the A c l U has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information that the Trump administration is using as

the basis for its voter fraud claims go. We're talking with two experts in election law, Nate Personally, professor at Stanford Law School, and Richard Fall, professor at Columbia Law School,

about President Donald Trump's Presidential Commission on Election Integrity. Nate, as I said, there were many top Democrats who came out with statements and civil rights leaders charging that this is an effort to uh, really to suppress voter turnout among minorities, the poor, and the elder by putting up new barriers to voting, such as voter I D S. Would a federal commission be able to do that? The commission itself won't be able to pass any laws, but

it will um make recommendations, perhaps of federal legislation. The commission I served under, we made recommendations principally to the states, because that's where most election law is created, and so that was what we viewed as our goal and really tried to focus on the best practices from the states

so that we could improve election administration and performance. But let me just we have to pull away the veneer a little bit with this executive order in this commission, which is that we have to remember that this is reverse engineered in order to justify a tweet that happened in the wake of President Trump's loss of the popular vote. And so these people are appointed and uh, their mission is to justify the idea that three to five million

illegal votes were cast in the last electction. And so you can't rip this commission out of that context, especially when the Vice president is leading it and he has said that he believes that to be true already. Is the timing of this suspicious. Many people are saying that it's timed to to take attention away from the Comey firing and the FBI. I don't think it has. In some ways, I could see two stories in that regard. One is that it's attempt to distract from the Comey investigation.

The other is the Comey investigation is distracting from this, and so you sort of slip it in at the same time that everyone's preoccupied with that. I don't think, um,

it's distracting from everything happening with Comey. At least if you look at the front pages today, this is really below the fold um and you know this is something that's going to be going on and on over the next few years as they appoint new members and investigate the claims of voter front Well, speaking of appointing new members and actually putting a commission together, Rich, we have a commission here that doesn't really have any you know,

a full complement of members or a staff or anything else, And so it's not clear who's going to end up on this. Is there any positive what do you think the possibilities are that, you know, Democrats and independent election experts would be willing to serve on this commission, giving the suspicion, given the suspicions a lot of them have

about it, it's hard to say. I mean, part of the fact, the very fact that it was rushed out like this, So those sort of give credence to the idea that maybe there was an attempt to distract from the comby affair. The commission is not ready, and the White House at the President and talking about doing something like this for months. Why now when it's not even fully done In terms of people joining up, It's hard

to say. I mean, on the one hand, it's sort of it's sort of um resonates to all of the statements people are making since November about how valuable would be for high quality people to join the Trump administration and to contribute their expertise and their knowledge and their you know, their commitment to standards. We saw what happened with Mr Rosenstein trying to do that. Um, I don't know.

I mean, I think they're the sense that this is clearly a facade, that this is a veiled device designed to both Nates suggests to give some kind of support for the idea that there were millions of illegal votescast, and then maybe going beyond that, to give to provide a program to make a tougher to add new restrictions on voting going forward. I mean, the Commission itself doesn't have the power to do it, but it has the

bully put have the bully pulpit. Um, it's you know, I'm sure they would want to, as some people who are not die hard Republicans, to make it look more legitimate, but it's not clear that you ever will be legitimate. Nate, what's your reaction to the a c L you filing a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information that the Trump administration is using as the basis for its voter

fraud claims. Well, I see that mainly as a strategic device in order to highlight the fact that they don't have the evidence that there's three to five million illegal votes cast in the election. Realized that if that had been the level of illegal voting in the last election, the voter turnout among the undocumented population would have rivaled

that of citizens. And so it's not as if, um, you know, you know, if you had hordes of illegal voters of flooding the polling place, you would have had a much higher voter turnout than we had in this election, and you would have been able to see it left

and right. And so I see this the a c l US attempt here as well as future attempts that people are going to lodge under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, just a way to try to keep this commission in check into continue and needle ith in order to justify its mission. Rich given those kinds of efforts, in the fact that we don't have a commission put together yet, Um, if you had to predict how long the commission's work is going to take, how long would it be? It

really is unpredictable. I mean, they it's it's they don't have a full commission, they don't have a staff. The Vice President is sharing it, and he has other things to do. They do have a very activist and very determined of ICE chair, Chris Kodak of Kansas Secretary of State, and he may want to push it pretty hard. You know, I'm it's hard to say. I mean, I think any any number I give would be totally made up. Um,

you know, bloom Ye, it will be. I mean, as Nate points out, they might actually even want to wait to pass the twenty eighteen election. They might want to come out sometime next year. All the idea that maybe to press Congress to pass some restrictive measures that would make it hard for people to vote in federal elections. It's just impossible to tell thank you both for being

for being on Bloomberg Law. That's we should Refall professor at Columbia Law School and Nate personally, professor at Stanford Law School, both election law experts. Coming up on Bloomberg Law. We're going to be talking about the Fire Music Festival. It was on an exclusive island in the Bahamas. It was billed as a luxury experience from start to finish, but it finished before it started, and there's a one hundred million dollar lass filed saying it was more like

the Hunger Games. We're going to speak to the plaintiff's attorney in that, and later in the show we're going to be talking about the EU Commissioner of Anti Trust and how she has built a reputation, a sort of a star's reputation in Europe. That's coming up on Bloomberg Law. I'm June Grosso with Michael Best and Greg Store. You've been listening to Bloomberg Law. This is Bloomberg