WASHINGTON (CN) – President Donald Trump on Wednesday questioned the motives of states that have thus far refused to comply with his voter fraud commission’s request for extensive personal voter information, musing “one has to wonder what they’re worried about.”
“There’s something. There always is,” he told attendees at the first public meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence, promised the commission will operate with no preordained conclusions.
But in doing so the president repeated unsubstantiated claims that illegal votes are canceling out lawful ones.
He also suggested – without citing any evidence to support the claim – that voter irregularities in some states involved “very large numbers of people.”
The president then called election integrity an American issue.
“It’s about the concern of so many Americans that improper voting has taken place, and cancelling out the vote of lawful American citizens,” he said.
During and after the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said that people approached him to express their concerns about voting irregularities.
“In some cases having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states,” Trump said.
The president established the commission by executive order after claiming without evidence that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because millions voted fraudulently in the 2016 election. Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, who won more votes from the electoral college than his Democratic rival.
Critics say Trump created the panel to help justify his claims of massive voter fraud. Most members of the commission focused their comments Wednesday on ways to protect the integrity of each American's vote.
The May 11 executive order charges the commission with studying federal registration and voting processes. It asks the 12-member panel to identify laws, rules, and policies that both enhance and undermine American confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections, and to identify vulnerabilities in voting and registration systems that could lead to fraud.
Numerous studies have found that voter fraud does happen, but is rare and statistically insignificant.
However several of the commission's members - including Hans von Spakovsky with the Heritage Foundation - said that many local elections are decided by a handful of votes, making the issue critical in some cases.
The conservative think tank has compiled a database, which it says is not exhaustive, that documents 1,071 cases of voter fraud, which includes 938 criminal convictions.
That includes cases of impersonation, false registrations, duplicate voting, voting by non-citizens, buying votes, altering vote counts and fraudulent use of absentee ballots.
But the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law says most allegations of fraud are baseless. According to its 2007 study on voter fraud, an American is more likely to be struck by lightning than cast a fraudulent vote.
A more recent review from Stanford University study estimates that just 0.02 percent of votes cast in the 2012 election were double votes, some of which the 2017 study found can be attributed to measurement errors in reporting turnout in voter files.
However commission members devoted a good chunk of their meeting Wednesday to identifying double voters and cleaning up state voter rolls.
Alan King, a probate judge in Jefferson County, Alabama said he was astounded how many people can be registered in multiple states.