TOPEKA, Kan. — Voting rights advocates and some state election officials cheered President Donald Trump’s announcement that he was disbanding his election fraud commission, but their celebration could be short-lived.
Trump spiked the commission late Wednesday amid infighting and refusals by numerous states to cooperate, but at the same time transferred its mission to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. That concerns some election officials and experts who had been critical of the commission.
DHS could have broad legal authority to conduct an investigation into Trump’s unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud. That’s because of a declaration at the end of President Barack Obama’s administration that election infrastructure is vital to national security.
“I am deeply concerned that the work is being shifted over to DHS where it can be done behind closed doors and without the sunshine offered from open public scrutiny,” Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, a Democrat, said in a statement Thursday to The Associated Press.
He said the move “only fuels fears of a federal takeover” of elections, which are overseen by the states and carried out by thousands of local jurisdictions. The decentralized nature of the country’s elections has been seen as a buffer against attempts at widespread manipulation.
Trump convened the commission in May to investigate the 2016 presidential election after repeatedly making unsubstantiated claims that between 3 million and 5 million illegally cast ballots had cost him the popular vote. Trump won the Electoral College.
Trump said in tweets early Thursday that the states, mostly Democratic leaning, “fought hard that the Commission not see their records or methods because they know that many people are voting illegally.”
An AP tally showed 15 states and the District of Columbia denied the commission’s request for detailed voter data, some of which are Republican-leaning. Those include North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wyoming. The commission initially requested partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, voting history and other information before criticism forced it to scale back its request.
States’ reasons for denying the request varied. They included concerns that the commission’s ultimate goal was voter suppression primarily targeting the poor and minorities, voter privacy and issues of states’ rights.
It wasn’t immediately clear what direction the Department of Homeland Security’s work on election fraud would take.
Kobach and other Republicans have pushed for state laws requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls or to provide papers documenting U.S. citizenship to register.
The Kansas secretary of state’s prominent role on the commission fueled opposition to it. Kansas has some of the nation’s toughest voter ID laws, and Kobach is enmeshed in multiple lawsuits. Before Trump took office, Kobach took a proposal into a meeting with the president-elect laying out ideas for changing federal laws to make it easier for states to impose such requirements.
On Thursday, Kobach told the AP that the Department of Homeland Security could move forward by checking its list of non-citizens living in the U.S. against voter registration data.