Trump on states rejecting voter fraud commission request: 'What are they trying to hide?'
Amid a series of media-focused tweets Saturday morning, President Trump paused to insinuate nearly half of state governments are concealing wrongdoing because they have not complied with a request from his new Election Integrity Commission for an extensive set of voter data to fuel an election fraud investigation:
The commission is tasked with investigating Trump's persistent but unsupported claim that he only lost the popular vote in the 2016 election because millions of illegal votes were cast. To that end, it has requested the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security number digits, and 10 years of voting history of every voter in every state.
So far, two dozen states with Republican and Democratic leadership alike have rejected the data demands. "There's not enough bourbon here in Kentucky to make this request seem sensible," said Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes (D). "Not on my watch are we going to be releasing sensitive information that relate to the privacy of individuals."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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