Still the only voter ID anyone should need
Have state officials turned over Texas voter information to the federal government?
In short, not yet.
A lawsuit by the Texas NAACP and the Texas League of Women Voters has halted the state’s release of that information to the commission after a Travis County district judge granted the groups a temporary restraining order in October. But the state has taken its case to an appeals court, arguing the lower court has no jurisdiction.
The appeals court has given no timeline on when it will rule on the matter, but until then no voter information will be shared with the fraud commission, which agreed in September to halt its request until the jurisdiction question was resolved.
[…]
Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said it is unclear whether the commission is subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, so Texas should think twice about handing over its voter roll information. But if it’s not subject to that law, the commission may be under other constraints about what information it can request and how it can do so.
“That’s what the federal lawsuits are about. It’s an open question,” said Levitt, who oversaw voting rights battles for the Department of Justice under President Barack Obama.
Until those questions are resolved, Levitt said, there is nothing obligating Texas to turn over the information.
“This is just a request,” he said. “There’s nothing in Texas state law and nothing in federal law that I’m aware of that would force Texas to give the data over.”
See here, here, and here for the background. The lawsuit from which the injunction came was filed in state court, but as noted later in the piece there were federal lawsuits filed as well. And just as I was prepping to queue this post up for publication, this happened.
President Trump signed an executive order late Wednesday disbanding his own election integrity commission after less than eight months, saying he didn’t want to waste taxpayer money fighting with state governments over their voter data.
But the co-chairman of the panel, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, said the investigation into alleged voter fraud would continue — and could pick up speed without the formalities of a commission.
Trump said the commission’s work will now go to the Department of Homeland Security.
“Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Trump said in a statement through his press secretary. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” Trump said.
Good riddance, I say, though it sounds like we’re not quite out of the woods yet. Keep up the good fight against this travesty. Think Progress, Daily Kos, and Mother Jones have more.
“Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Trump said in a statement through his press secretary.
Put up or shut up, you liar.
What a complete clown show cluster Trump and his commission have been.
I’m not sure why everyone seems to have missed this:
“Trump said the commission’s work will now go to the Department of Homeland Security.”
The vote-suppressors’ problem with the current commission was that it was too public and had Democratic members. After Commissioner Matt Dunlap (Maine’s Dem Secretary of State) won his suit to require he be fully included in all communications and decisions of the commission, the fraudsters decided to take their suppression work underground. I don’t view this dissolution as a positive development at all.
I didn’t miss the DHS bit, but do they have enough staffing to take on this extra task? Won’t they still have the same issues with states not turning over data and filing lawsuits and such?