States Fighting Back Against Trump Vote Commission
BALDWIN: Now to a conflict some are saying is partisan, others just contend this is about privacy. More than 40 states, we're counting now 44 and growing, defying this request from the president's commission to study voter fraud, and it's not just Democrats here. It's not just Democratic officials balking at giving over information like voter names, addresses, birthdays, political affiliations, criminal history, last four digits of your Social Security number, but also Republicans. Republican secretaries of state are also refusing to comply, like the one in Louisiana. He is saying -- and let me just quote him -- "The president's commission has quickly politicized its work by asking states for an incredible amount of voter data that I have time and time again refused to release." You remember this question of voter fraud? It's coming up because of President Trump. Let me just take you back and remind you.</s>QUESTION: So, you brought in congressional leaders to the White House. You spoke at length about the presidential election with them, telling them that you lost the popular vote because of millions of illegal votes, three to five million illegal votes.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: That was supposed to be a confidential meeting, and you weren't supposed to go out and talk to the press.</s>QUESTION: But three million to five million illegal votes?</s>TRUMP: Well, we're going to find out, but it could very well be that much.</s>BALDWIN: That has been entirely unfounded. Myrna Perez is with me, leads the Voter Rights and Elections Project at Brennan Center for Justice. She is back. Thank you so much for coming in.</s>MYRNA PEREZ, BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE: Glad to be here. Thank you. Happy Fourth of July.</s>BALDWIN: Thank you. You too. Explain to me what the president's commission can actually collect. What's OK? Well, part of the problem is that the whole structure behind the commission is one that is dubious and people are very skeptical of it. It was created basically to justify the president's outlandish claims that massive voter fraud--</s>BALDWIN: Where there's no evidence, right.</s>PEREZ: Right, when there's no evidence. And he staffed it with like a who's-who of vote suppressors. Certainly, a commission, a presidential commission can conduct research, they can conduct hearings. And nobody objects to being -- nobody objects to that kind of research. What people are concerned about is that the requests that were sent to the states last week were vast. They implicated issues of privacy. They implicated issues of state law.</s>BALDWIN: But on the issues of privacy, and I can understand the frustration because the premise is unfounded, according to you and other people I have talked to. That said, Mark Rotter (ph) says, well, no, no, we're not asking for anything that's not already out there, when we're talking about this information of voters. If it's public, what's wrong with us asking about it?</s>PEREZ: This is a great thing to clear up for the public.</s>BALDWIN: Yes.</s>PEREZ: Every state allows some sort of way of inspecting their voter rolls. But most states have limits on what information you can get, how you can get it, how you can use it, whether or not you can distribute it to other people. And once a state passes this data over this commission that then has to make everything publicly available, they can't enforce their own state laws. So one very concrete example is if you had a law in your state that said you can't use the information for commercial use, once they give it to the commission, what's to stop a company from looking at it and sending promotional material to everyone? It's different.</s>BALDWIN: Sure, and therein lies some of the frustration. I remember when the story first came out, I think it was last week, and you had a lot of these Democratic governors or really mostly secretaries of state saying this isn't OK, I'm not giving you my information. I remember Terry McAuliffe of Georgia -- Democrat, Virginia, last week wrote: "I have no intention of honoring this request. Virginia conducts fair, honest and democratic elections. And there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in Virginia." Flash-forward a couple of days. More and more states pile on. And now you have Republican secretaries of state saying, no, no, no, federal government, don't you meddle in my state processes. So this seems more -- it less like a partisan issue and more like a states' rights issue.</s>PEREZ: Well, maybe. I think the commission put the states in a terrible position. One, it caused a bunch of legal problems for them, because, again, they can't enforce their own laws vs. -- about how you maintain certain privacy aspects of the voter rolls, notwithstanding the fact that, in some ways, they're public.</s>BALDWIN: Yes.</s>PEREZ: Two, it created a political problem for them.