The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (PEIC or PACEI), also called the Voter Fraud Commission, was a presidential commission established by Donald Trump that ran from May 11, 2017, to January 3, 2018. The Trump administration said the commission would review claims of voter fraud, improper registration, and voter suppression. The establishment of the commission followed Trump's false claim that millions of illegal immigrants had voted in the 2016 presidential election, costing him the popular vote. Vice President Mike Pence was chosen as chair of the commission and Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach was its vice chair and day-to-day administrator.
On June 28, 2017, Kobach, in conjunction with the Department of Justice, asked every state for personal voter information. The request was met with significant bipartisan backlash; 44 states and the District of Columbia declined to supply some or all of the information, citing privacy concerns or state laws.Allan J. Lichtman, The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present (Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 223.
Trump's creation of the commission was criticized by voting rights advocates, scholars and experts, and newspaper editorial boards as a pretext for, and prelude to, voter suppression."Trump's voter-fraud commission itself is a fraud". The Washington Post. July 18, 2017. Retrieved July 19, 2017, "...In fact, the real fraud is the commission itself...."Miles Rapoport on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (May 30, 2017): "President Trump's decision to establish a panel to study voter fraud and suppression, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, has been roundly criticized by voter rights advocates and Democrats." ... [Miles Rapoport, Senior Democracy Practice Fellow Ash Center]: "There are a number of really serious problems with the Commission as it has been announced and conceptualized, which have led many people to say that its conclusions are pre-determined and that it will be used as an excuse for new efforts to restrict access to voting."Michael Waldman, Donald Trump Tells His Voter Fraud Panel: Find Me 'Something', Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law (July 20, 2017) (also republished at The Daily Beast): "The panel was created to justify one of the more outlandish presidential fibs ... After Trump was roundly mocked for his claim of 3 to 5 million illegal voters, the panel was launched in an effort to try to rustle up some evidence—any evidence—for the charge.... The purpose of the panel is not just to try to justify his laughable claims of millions of invisible illegal voters. It aims to stir fears, to lay the ground for new efforts to restrict voting. Trump's claims, after all, are just a cartoon version of the groundless arguments already used to justify restrictive voting laws."Mark Berman & David Weigel, Trump’s voting commission asked states to hand over election data. Some are pushing back., Washington Post (June 30, 2017): "Experts described the request as ... a recipe for potential voter suppression.... 'This is an attempt on a grand scale to purport to match voter rolls with other information in an apparent effort to try and show that the voter rolls are inaccurate and use that as a pretext to pass legislation that will make it harder for people to register to vote,' said Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine. Hasen said he has "no confidence" in whatever results the committee produces. He said the commission and its request create a number of concerns, including that it is an election group created by one candidate for office—Trump, who already is campaigning for reelection—and headed by Pence, another political candidate. 'It's just a recipe for a biased and unfair report,' Hasen said. "And it's completely different from the way that every other post-election commission has been done."Max Greenwood, Newspapers rip Trump voter fraud panel in July Fourth editorials, The Hill (July 4, 2017). At least eight lawsuits were filed accusing the Commission of violating the law.
On January 3, 2018, Trump abruptly disbanded the commission; he stated the claims of election fraud and cited many states' refusal to turn over information as well as the pending lawsuits. The commission found no evidence of voter fraud. At that time, Trump asked that the investigation be transferred to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which already holds much of the requested state voter data and oversees immigration records. The acting DHS press secretary said that Kobach would not be advising or working with DHS, and the White House said it would destroy all the state voter data collected by the commission.
Background 2016 campaign
During his campaign for president, Trump made numerous claims of voter fraud occurring in the United States.
In the weeks before the election, Trump urged his supporters to volunteer as poll watchers on Election Day, saying they were needed to guard against "voter fraud" and a "rigged" outcome. The rhetoric was seen by some as a call to intimidate minority voters or challenge their credentials to prevent them from voting. Numerous organizations, including the Democratic Party officials and affiliates sued Trump accusing him of voter intimidation, in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act.
Post-election On November 8, 2016, Trump won the 2016 United States presidential election, but lost the popular vote to opponent Hillary Clinton by about 2.9 million votes. Trump falsely claimed that he won the popular vote "if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally" and that three to five million people voted illegally in the 2016 election.Trump scraps his own voter fraud commission, BBC News (4 January 2018).
Kris Kobach proposal On November 22, 2016, Kobach met with then president-elect Trump in his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey in consideration for Secretary of Homeland Security position. The Associated Press photographed Kobach taking into his meeting with Trump a document entitled "Department of Homeland Security, Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 Days" referencing a possible amendment to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
The American Civil Liberties Union, representing plaintiffs in a voting rights case, asked the federal judge to prevent Kobach from withholding from the public documents he presented to Trump by virtue of marking them "confidential". The plaintiffs demanded the public release of those documents that had been prepared with state funds, claiming Kobach "made statements to the public, the Court, and the president, suggesting that noncitizen registration fraud is a serious, widespread problem," while at the same time trying to hide those same documents that reject his claim, to prevent having to testify in open court about those materials.Civil rights advocates: ‘Confidential’ documents undercut Kobach’s voting fraud claim, Lawrence Journal World, Associated Press, June 21, 2017; retrieved June 22, 2017. In June 2017, the federal magistrate judge found that Kobach had made "patently misleading representations" to the court in the course of the document dispute. Kobach was fined $1,000 for "deceptive conduct and lack of candor" and ordered to submit to questioning under oath by the ACLU about the documents and about a draft amendment to the National Voter Registration Act "which would have added a line to the federal voter law that said states could request any information from voters they deem necessary."
Voter irregularities in the United States
Voter impersonation
Only US citizens have the right to vote in federal elections. While the United States Congress has jurisdiction over laws applying to federal elections, it has deferred the making of most aspects of election laws to the states. Therefore, the administration of voter registration requirements, voting requirements, and elections vary widely across jurisdictions.
Voter impersonation (also sometimes called in-person voter fraud) is a form of electoral fraud in which a person who is eligible to vote in an election votes more than once, or a person who is not eligible to vote does so by voting under the name of an eligible voter. In the United States, voter ID laws have been enacted in a number of states since 2010 with the aim of preventing voter impersonation. Research has shown that voter impersonation is extremely rare. There is no evidence that in-person voter fraud has changed the result of any election.
In a few cases, permanent residents ("green card" holders) have registered to vote and have cast ballots without realizing that doing so was illegal. Non-citizens convicted in criminal court of having made a false claim of citizenship for the purpose of registering to vote in a federal election can be fined and imprisoned for up to a year. Deportation and removal proceedings have resulted from several such cases.Kirk Semple, "Immigrants Find Voting Can Come At a Cost". The New York Times, October 15, 2010.
In an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law looked at 42 jurisdictions, focusing on ones with large population of noncitizens. Of 23.5 million votes surveyed, election officials referred an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation, or about 0.0001% of votes cast. Douglas Keith, the counsel in the Brennan Center's Democracy Program and co-author of the analysis, said, "President Trump has said repeatedly that millions of people voted illegally in 2016, but our interviews with local election administrators made clear that rampant noncitizen voting simply did not occur. Any claims to the contrary make their job harder and distract from progress toward needed improvements like automatic voter registration."
Voter registration irregularities
Voter registration is the process of collecting applications to vote, adjudicating those applications, and maintaining the rolls of qualified voters. The process of voter registration is generally left to the states. In an effort to increase voter turnout, a state may adopt less restrictive policies, including motor voter registration and same day registration. In an effort to decrease in-person voter fraud, a state may adopt stricter policies for registration, including proof of citizenship at the time of registration. Federal elections do not require proof of citizenship, only a statement on the signed application.
Voter rolls may include erroneous superfluous entries as a result of fraudulent registration, or of failure to purge the roll when a voter dies, moves, or is sent to prison. A qualified voter may be legally registered in only one precinct. This is a matter of state law. In 2012, the Pew Trust estimated that 24 million voter records were inaccurate or invalid, including approximately 1.8 million records of deceased people who remained on voter rolls. In October 2016, Trump conflated these irregularities with voter fraud and wrongly cited the Pew report as evidence that 1.8 million people were fraudulently voting against him. Voting twice is a third degree felony in most states. Superfluous entries on a voter roll do not affect elections.Erroneously voting using the superfluous entry instead of one's true registration entry does not impact the outcome of an election. Example 1: A person uses the mail in ballot of his deceased wife rather than his own to cast a vote. Example 2: A person owns two homes, is registered to vote in both homes, but only votes once. This is not uncommon. (For reference, see )