Voter-Fraud Commission's Data Problem
VANN R. NEWKIRK II
5:19 PM ET
... Over 500 comments were submitted online during the run-up to the second meeting of the commission on Tuesday ... Many of those comments were in the same vein as those from the San Diego poll watcher, containing anecdotes or hearsay about egregious incidents of voter fraud or alleging massive levels of fraud on a national level. While those public comments weren’t directly addressed during the proceedings of the meeting, they did help set its tone, as .. commissioners grappled with the gap between rhetoric on voter fraud — backed by ample anecdote — and data .. which are scant ...
... The argument in favor of the legitimacy of the commission has been weakened by the tendency of Trump and Kobach to commit the logical fallacy of begging the question: They have invoked unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in order to argue for the necessity of a commission to prove that voter fraud exists ...
... Ken Block, the president of a software firm that used a consumer dataset to match the names and partial Social Security numbers of voters, claimed that his group was “able to identify with high confidence, several examples of voter fraud” and that “no government agency is looking for voter fraud.” The accuracy of the latter statement aside—states certify elections results and check for double voters using much more complete datasets than his—Block never detailed the source or the data collection methodology of his proprietary data. If that dataset contains false duplicates or imputes the wrong Social Security number to two people with identical names, it would create duplicate voters for Block to pick up ...
... On September 7, Kobach .. claimed in a column he wrote for Breitbart (where he is a paid contributor) that "facts .. indicate .. a .. close election was likely changed through voter fraud ... New Hampshire’s U.S. Senate Seat, and perhaps also New Hampshire’s four electoral college votes in the presidential election." To Kobach, the source of that fraud was .. out-of-staters who didn’t have updated driver’s licenses, and .. were "never were bona fide residents of the State."
.. on Tuesday, when confronted with data .. challenging his claim — specifically, New Hampshire only requires voters to be domiciled, not residents, which means that out-of-staters can vote legitimately — Kobach changed his claim, instead criticizing the New Hampshire law ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/the-trump-voter-fraud-commissions-data-problem/539547/
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