Trump Pushes Voter ID After Disbanding Bogus Voter Fraud Commission
After announcing he was dissolving his bogus voter fraud committee to avoid tumultuous legal battles, President Donald Trump on Thursday promoted what he said was the need for voter ID laws.
“System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D.,” Trump tweeted. “As Americans, you need identification, sometimes in a very strong and accurate form, for almost everything you do … except when it comes to the most important thing, VOTING for the people that run your country.”
Trump’s message runs counter to the emphasis of the voter fraud commission, which has emphasized the need to purge voter rolls over voter ID laws.
Trump also tweeted that it was “mostly Democratic states” that refused to share voter data because “they know that many people are voting illegally.”
Trump issued an executive order Wednesday evening, effectively dissolving his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. In a statement, he said he made the decision because he wanted to avoid “endless legal battles at taxpayer expense.” The commission is facing numerous lawsuits from civil rights and privacy groups who complain the panel is being used to push for voting restrictions and that the data requests violate privacy laws.
A large swath of states repeatedly rejected the commission’s requests for voter data. The commission initially asked states for information like addresses, military status and the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers. The commission later requested publicly available voter data, but many Democratic and Republican-majority states continued to refuse.
