Written by Hans von Spakovsky

If you have no idea what happened at the second meeting of President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in New Hampshire on Sept. 12, I’m not surprised.

Though a horde of reporters attended the meeting, almost all of the media stories that emerged from it simply repeated the progressive left’s mantra that the commission is a “sham.”

Almost no one covered the substantive and very concerning testimony of 10 expert witnesses on the problems that exist in our voter registration and election system.

The witnesses included academics, election lawyers, state election officials, data analysts, software experts, and computer scientists.

The existing and potential problems they exposed would give any American with any common sense and any concern for our democratic process cause for alarm.

The first panel included Andrew Smith of the University of New Hampshire, Kimball Brace of Election Data Services Inc., and John Lott. They testified about historical election turnout statistics and the effects of election integrity issues on voter confidence.

Lott also testified that his statistical analyses show that contrary to the narrative myth pushed by some, voter ID does not depress voter turnout. In fact, there is some evidence that it may increase turnout because it increases public confidence in elections.

In a second panel, Donald Palmer, the former chief election official in two states—Florida and Virginia—testified about the problems that exist in state voter registration systems.

He made a series of recommendations to improve the accuracy of voter rolls, including working toward “interoperability” of state voter lists so that states “can identify and remove duplicate registration of citizens who are registered to vote in more than one state.”

Robert Popper, a former Justice Department lawyer now with Judicial Watch, testified about the failure of the Justice Department to enforce the provisions of the National Voter Registration Act that require states to maintain the accuracy of their voter lists.

He said there has been a “pervasive failure by state and county officials” to comply with the National Voter Registration Act, and complained about the under-enforcement of state laws against voter fraud.

Ken Block of Simpatico Software Systems gave a stunning report on the comparison that his company did of voter registration and voter history data from 21 states. He discussed how difficult and expensive it was to get voter data from many states—data that is supposed to be freely available to the public.

According to Block, “the variability in access, quality, cost, and data provided impedes the ability to examine voter activity between states.”

Yet using an extremely conservative matching formula that included name, birthdate, and Social Security number, Block found approximately 8,500 voters who voted in two different states in the November 2016 election, including 200 couples who voted illegally together. He estimated that “there would be 40,000 duplicate votes if data from every state were available.”

Of those duplicate voters, 2,200 cast a ballot in Florida—four times George W. Bush’s margin of victory in 2000. His analysis “indicates a high likelihood [of] voter fraud” and that there is “likely much more to be found.”

As a member of the commission, I testified about The Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database. That non-comprehensive database has 1,071 examples of proven incidents of fraud ranging from one illegal vote to hundreds. It includes 938 criminal convictions, 43 civil penalties, and miscellaneous other cases.

Heritage is about to add another 19 cases to the database. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg, since many cases are never prosecuted and there is no central source for information on election fraud.

The commission also heard about a report published by Shawn Jasper, the Republican speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. That report stated that over 6,500 individuals in 2016 used an out-of-state driver’s license to take advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration law to register and vote on Election Day.

Despite a law that requires an individual with an out-of-state license to obtain a New Hampshire license within 60 days of establishing residency in the state, only 15.5 percent have done so.

Many have tried to explain this away be saying those voters must all have been college students living in New Hampshire. Perhaps that is true.

But it may also be true that voters from Massachusetts and other surrounding states decided to take advantage of New Hampshire’s law to cross the border and vote in a presidential and Senate race, which were decided by only 3,000 and 1,000 voters, respectively.

Of course, we won’t know the truth of what happened unless we do what should be done, and what the commission’s critics don’t want to be done: investigate these cases.

Finally, the commission heard from three computer experts—Andrew Appel of Princeton University, Ronald Rivest of MIT, and Harri Hursti of Nordic Innovation Labs. Their testimony about the ability of hackers to get into electronic voting equipment and just about every other device that uses the internet (and even those that don’t) was chilling.

As Appel stated, our challenge is to ensure that when voters go to the polls, they can “trust that their votes will be recorded accurately, counted accurately, and aggregated accurately.” He made a series of “technological and organization” recommendations for achieving that objective.

All in all, the Sept. 12 meeting, which was hosted by Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s longtime Democratic secretary of state, was both informative and comprehensive. But anyone who didn’t attend would never know that based on the skimpy and biased coverage it received in the media.

The hearing is evidence of the good work the commission is already doing in bringing to light the problems we face in ensuring the integrity of our election process.

This article was originally posted at The Daily Signal.

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity has held only two public meetings so far, but it’s already netted a haul of eye-opening data.

At last Tuesday’s meeting in New Hampshire, Ken Block, a data mining expert and former adjunct professor of technology and business at the University of Rhode Island, presented a summary of a 36-page study, “America the Vulnerable: The Problem of Duplicate Voting.”

Compiled by the Government Accountability Institute partnered with Simpatico Software Systems and Virtual DBS, Inc., the reportconcludes that state election systems are shockingly vulnerable to fraud because of faulty voter roll maintenance.

Sorting data from 21 states comprising 75 million voters in 2016, GAI identified 8,471 “high-confidence” duplicate voting matches. Some 200 couples voted in two different states. Initially, there were 60,000 potential duplicate matches of names and birthdates, but the researchers had to make certain by using additional data from credit reports, Social Security or magazine subscription information.

By the way, voting twice is a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and up to a $5,000 fine.

Scoffers might say that 8,471 is small potatoes in a nation where 130 million people voted in the November election in 2016.  But it’s only one of many ways to make vote fraud easier, and lots of elections are decided by slim margins. George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 by a 537-vote margin in Florida, where 5,825,043 votes were cast.

In the 2016 presidential election in Florida, about 2,200 duplicate voters cast a ballot — four times Bush’s margin of victory in the state in 2000.

Democrat Al Franken unseated incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman in Minnesota in 2008 with a final recount victory of 312 votes, sealing the 60^th vote in the Senate for passage of Obamacare. It was later learned that more than 1,000 ineligible felon voters – an overwhelmingly Democratic constituency – cast ballots in the Minnesota race.

In New Hampshire, Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte lost her seat by 1,017 votes to Democrat Maggie Hassan in November 2016 out of 739,140 cast. More than 5,500 same-day registrant voters with out-of-state driver’s licenses claimed residency but did not bother later to obtain New Hampshire licenses.

In Virginia, Democrat Mark Herring defeated Republican Mark Obenshain in the attorney general’s race by only 165 votes out of more than 2.2 million cast in 2013.

It’s clear that a few votes can swing an election, which is why voter registration rolls around the nation are long overdue for the kind of scrutiny they are finally receiving.

The GAI researchers obtained records from Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and West Virginia.

They tried to get them from other states, but some charge a king’s ransom, and others have sloppy records. For instance, more than 700,000 votes in New York’s dataset are labeled “General Election,” but no year is given.

Massachusetts makes it virtually impossible for anyone other than law enforcement agencies and political parties. You can get the data – if you go individually through all 351 cities and towns, which is prohibitive in time and cost. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 requires every state to maintain a centralized registration database, but, “in effect, Massachusetts and other states withhold this data from the public,” the report says.

One of the more interesting finds was the more than 15,000 clearly prohibited addresses in the 21-state sample. Five thousand people used UPS store addresses. Three thousand more used U.S. Post Office boxes. Others used gas stations, vacant lots, abandoned mills, basketball courts, parks and office buildings.

Some quite elderly voters turned up, with 45,880 votes cast in 2016 by people whose birthdates were more than 115 years ago. The report notes that some states indicate a missing birthdate by using filler dates, such as 01/01/1900.

This might help explain some eye-opening data revealed in July in federal court in Broward County, Florida. The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) is suing election officials over the county’s inflated rolls, in which 103 percent of eligible citizens are registered. Thousands of voters over 100 years old are listed, some as old as 130.

Last year, an ACRU volunteer researcher turned up 176 active voters 110 or older who voted in 2012 in three Pennsylvania counties. To put this in perspective, the 2010 United States Census found only 330 “supercentenarians,” that is, people 110 or older, in the entire nation.

As progressives howl that the election integrity commission should be disbanded despite already proving its worth, it will be fascinating to see the lengths to which the naysayers will go.

They just might wake Americans up to their real agenda.

This article was originally posted at TownHall.com

They claim creating an election integrity commission is a way to advance voter suppression.

Progressives are in an uproar over the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, and we have to ask why?

Why not look into ways to protect our elections from fraud?

Because to do so would advance “white supremacy,” according to Democratic U.S. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York, who tweeted on Aug. 24, that “If the president wants to truly show that he rejects the discrimination agenda of the white supremacist movement, he will rescind the Executive Order that created this commission.”

Then, he warned, “And if the president does not act, the Congress should prohibit its operation through one of the must-pass legislative vehicles in September.”

Wow. So, the Democrats would shut down Congress in order to keep a blue-ribbon panel from studying the vulnerabilities of our election process? Mr. Schumer must truly fear this commission. He wants it to disband even before its second official meeting on Sept. 12 in New Hampshire.

“The Ku Klux Klan and its sympathizers at all levels of government denied black Americans the right to vote for decades,” Mr. Schumer continued in his tweet without a hint of irony. The Klan was the militant wing of the Democratic Party, which enforced Jim Crow laws against black people for 88 years. More on that later.

“Today, voting rights are once again under assault,” the senator bleated, er, tweeted. “The misguided Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision gutted the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to the same voter suppression tactics that existed before the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.” He means back when Democrats ran the show in the South.

Instead of Jim Crow, the Democrats rely today on the bureaucratic behemoth created under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which shattered the black family and still keeps blacks and other minorities beholden to the Democrats’ federal welfare plantation. They just have to keep promising more and more stuff to the Free Stuff Army. Who needs the Klan when you’ve got Uncle Sugar? But, what does chronic dependence do to people’s souls? Hey, don’t be getting all religious on me.

Mr. Schumer was not the first Democrat to cry that the sky would fall. Former Attorney General Eric Holder called the new commission “another frightening attempt to suppress the votes of certain Americans.” This kind of balderdash is not harmless. Commission members that I have talked to have reported harassment and even death threats.

Mr. Schumer equates any and all election integrity measures such as voter ID laws as brutal instruments designed to “suppress” the votes of minorities, the elderly and the young. In fact, minority voting has increased following passage of voter ID laws. Perhaps folks have more of an incentive to vote when they know their ballots will actually count.

Mr. Schumer contends that vote fraud is a myth cooked up to advance voter suppression.

This is a serious charge, and nobody knows better how to go about suppressing voters than the Democratic Party, which benefited from it for nearly nine decades with its Jim Crow system before congressional Republicans rammed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But back to the original question. Why not have a bipartisan panel of experts make sure that election officials are doing their jobs to ensure fairness and integrity? Indeed, if you think vote fraud poses no threat, why oppose a study that might prove your point? If the panel comes up empty, you get to crow. But if it exposes sloppy practices that enable fraudulent voting, shouldn’t you want to know that and clean up the mess?

Progressives crowed that some liberal state officials initially refused to provide voter data to the commission. But as of now, virtually all states are complying with the request, having been told by their attorneys that it is entirely lawful, especially since the data are already in the public realm and commercially available. What? You hadn’t heard from the media that the states are now cooperating?

Here’s one more thing to consider: All of the allegedly vulnerable identity groups: minorities, elderly, the young — strongly favor voter ID laws, since, like everyone else, they don’t want their votes stolen by someone casting a fraudulent ballot. Survey after survey shows it.

So, I think I know what’s behind the Democrats’ fear of the election integrity commission: They have already lost the argument over voter IDs. In its eventual report, the commission will be making the case for how to ensure accurate voter registration rolls. And, accurate voter rolls prevent vote fraud.

If that isn’t frightening to a liberal, nothing is.

This article was originally posted by The Washington Times.