Voting is among the most important of American freedoms.
Yet the Trump administration and the conservatives who support it rally around a false need for voter purges to eliminate mythical mass voter fraud while turning a completely blind eye to the clear and demonstrated threats of Russian hacking and manipulation in our 2016 elections.
In September, a conservative advocacy group known as the Public Interest Legal Foundation sent a notice to 248 county election officials in 24 states (including Georgia and Alabama) threatening them with a lawsuit if they don’t prune their rolls of voters who have died, moved or lost their eligibility to vote.
The request may sound reasonable enough, but it’s aimed at gaming the rules of elections, and one of group’s commissioners is now on Trump’s Election Integrity Commission.
The group’s threat to counties makes no mention of the Department of Homeland Security alarm sounded to Congress in June that Russian hackers targeted voter registration systems in 21 states ahead of last year’s presidential election. In one case, investigators found there had been a manipulation of voter data in a county database. (The alterations were discovered and rectified.) In Illinois, more than 90 percent of the nearly 90,000 records stolen by Russian state actors contained driver’s license numbers, and a quarter contained the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers.