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Privacy Watchdog Sues Trump's Election Committee Over Voter Data (engadget.com)
From a report: When the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity sent a letter to all 50 states seeking personal, identifying information on all voters in the US, at least 44 states refused in some part. Trump signed an executive order last May to create this commission while claiming that millions of people had voted illegally. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has taken issue with this request, as well, and has filed a lawsuit accusing the Commission of violating the privacy of American voters. EPIC also asserts that the original request asks states to send the data to a non-secure website, making the data vulnerable to identity theft and financial fraud. Not to mention political agendas. EPIC is also seeking information about "the failure to conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment," and has filed for a temporary restraining order "to block the Commission's efforts."
I'm not as concerned about voter privacy (which I happen to think that voter records are something that a federal government could legitimately have reasons to demand accurate and unified data on) as the likelihood that whoever in this administration tasked to do it is some part time Republican committee-connected programmer bro (maybe not even that lowly skilled) who hacks together some shitty piece of analysis code that comes to wrong conclusions, is misused for political purposes, and is vulnerable to hacking.
This is the flavor of the week for the administration. It's one thing they are putting out there to see if it flies, and that's about how long their interest and dedication to doing the job right will last. There are people (secretaries of state, registrars, data scientists) whose entire lives are dedicated to maintaining and verifying and analyzig voter rolls. Who do you trust to handle and come to conclusions about this kind of data conscientiously?
As the Republicans say, when the Federal Government comes knocking with the line "I'm here to help" you should be scared. They're right in this case.
You may want to actually read the links you post. I know the Heritage foundation thinks you are stupid enough to read the first few pages and think that they are all "dead people voting" but you should have more respect for yourself than they do.
These convictions run the gamut from idiots trying to run for office by pretending to live in a different district, people being payed to collect petition signatures or voter registrations who tried to scam their employers instead of doing the work, politicians outright buying votes, election officials tampering with ballots, and people on absentee voting drives improperly turning in ballots for other people which is a crime even though those other people filled the ballots out themselves. And other such technicalities:
XXX admitted to improperly assisting voters in
completing their absentee ballots in the 2005 Americus mayoral
election. XXX was a candidate in that election, and on at least six
occasions, he helped voters fill out information on their ballot mailers
without signing the requisite oath indicating he had provided the
assistance. He was ordered by the State Election Board to pay a
$600 fine
Your contention that it "only breaks one way" is also false. Plenty of news articles of Trumpkins trying to double vote.
Which is dumb. As the convictions show, it is very easy to catch you doing this. Only a few fools each year try it, the rest are dissuaded by us actually enforcing existing laws using existing precautionary mechanisms.
To start screwing around with people who *should* be allowed to vote for the sake of a teeny tiny number of people to are trying to defraud the system will get us less accurate results than doing nothing at all.
Someone had to do it.
I know lots of people say Trump is doing this because he's so egotistical that he can't believe he actually lost the popular vote. I actually think that's unlikely and 2 other reasons are a lot more likely.
1) It's simply red meat for his supporters and nothing more. If you have friends on Facebook who are pro-Trump and pro-Republican, you have probably been appalled at some of the crazy things they think are true. I'd love to see someone take a poll to verify this, but I suspect that Trump's supporters believe as much as 50% of the USA population is on welfare (actual number is about 8%) and that 20% or greater of the people in the USA are here illegally (it's actually about 4%).
2) Trump loves to distract his detractors with things they shouldn't even pay attention to, like tweets. Trump may actually know full well he lost the popular vote but this committee is meant to serve as a distraction from something else (health care failure maybe).
Keep in mind that some of the wing nuts on the left have already played into Trump's hand by publicly asserting that zero fraudulent voters occurred in the 2016 elections. All Trump has to do is find one anywhere and they're proven wrong. This could be simply about showing up his detractors who said there weren't any fraudulent votes and discrediting them for the future.
you now refuse to allow anyone to study the issue.
Not anyone. These people in particular. The head of the committee should have been too embarrassed to show his face in public after he made a big issue about one dead guy voting and they found said "dead guy" mowing his lawn. And Ken Blackwell? Please. It;s a rogues gallery of people who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near our electoral system.
Someone had to do it.
No one is protecting anything except Trump's fragile ego. This whole Advisory Commission action was set into motion because Trump can't accept the fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary. Total waste of time and money... .
I suppose you could look at it that way if you intended to keep up the partisan party line. Actually this whole thing makes good sense to me for a number of reasons.
First, Not comparing the various state's lists for duplicates allows for those who wish to commit voter fraud and vote multiple times in multiple states an easy way to do this.
Second, Some states do not have very good procedures to purge their voter rolls of various illegible voters including illegals, those who have moved out of state, people who have died and others who should not be voting. Having them on the rolls only makes vote fraud easier.
Now I'm not so sure that having some federal commission going though the voter rolls is a splendid idea, but it's not totally without reason or benefits.... Benefits? Yep....
1. Making some kinds of voter fraud harder to do and easier to detect.
2. Restoring public confidence in the voter registration process and the thus the election results.
So if we can put the partisan rhetoric aside a bit and discuss this, maybe we can come up with some kind of reasonable way to do this.
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