Congratulations to Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, who so far is one of the few Republicans standing up to President Trump’s voter fraud commission.
The president has claimed that between 3 million and 5 million people illegally voted in last November’s election. It’s apparently a big deal to him because even though he won the Electoral College, he lost the popular vote. Unfortunately, the president has not offered any evidence to support his claim. Most likely it is just another example of his skill at creating truthful hyperbole.
Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic secretaries of state across the country, who are responsible for managing elections, uniformly say they are confident their systems have no giant flaws in them. Enter the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which last week sent a letter to a number of secretaries of state asking for information on voters.
The commission wants states to give it registered voters’ names, dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers and other personal information. So far, several Democratic secretaries of state have refused, saying the request is an invasion of privacy.
Hosemann went one step further. He said the commission has not asked his office for the information — maybe that’s because the state has a voter ID law — but if it does, he will tell it to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Good for him. It is none of any commission’s business whether people voted in Republican or Democratic primaries, or how many elections they voted in over the years. As this appears to be nothing more than a fishing expedition, Hosemann’s reference to the Gulf of Mexico seems appropriate.
Hosemann already has a court victory in his pocket on this issue. Three years ago, after U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran got some extra votes in black and Democratic precincts to defeat Chris McDaniel in a Republican runoff, a Texas group sued the secretary of state to force him to provide information from the state’s voter rolls. Hosemann prevailed.
If the commission would like some free advice on where to look for voter fraud, it should look into absentee ballot trends. Handled properly and fairly, voter ID is a good method of verifying that people showing up to cast ballots are who they claim to be. There are less such protections in absentee ballots, and it ought to be pretty easy for the commission to get absentee results from each state. That would tell it which counties and precincts had an unusually high number of absentee voters, which would be a good place to start investigating.
More to the point, the commission should tell the president to give it any evidence he has that 3 million or more people voted illegally last November. This would mean that 2 percent of the 136 million votes were fraudulent.
