‘The report reads more like a ‘Get Out the Vote’ flyer designed to benefit partisan turnout than a careful and credible report on voting…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A nonprofit dedicated to maintaining election integrity says the latest report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights serves no purpose but scaremongering.
According to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the voting report from the “nonpartisan” eight-person panel—which contains only two conservatives—is riddled with errors and intent on discrediting the GOP.
“The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights isn’t living up to its historic standards,” said J. Christian Adams, PILF president and general counsel. “The report on voting and elections is full of errors, exaggerations, and outlandish efforts to scare minorities into thinking they won’t be able to cast a ballot.”
The USCCR has limited authority of its own and has been subject to partisan squabbling since at least the Reagan era, when it went to its current configuration with four members appointed by the president, two by the Senate and two by the House of Representatives.
However, members may be called to address Congress on the findings, which then may be used both to set a policy agenda and sway public perception.
The members are appointed to six-year terms and cannot be fired except for reasons of misconduct. Despite strict rules governing the number of party members who can be appointed to the commission, appointees have been able to circumvent restrictions by registering as independents.
All four of the current presidential appointees are holdovers from Barack Obama, with two of those being twilight appointments issued in December 2016.
Last year, the USCCR announced that it was launching a two-year probe into whether President Donald Trump was preventing civil rights offices from performing their duties by cutting their budgets and staffing.
Among the recommendations the report, titled An Assessment of Minority Voting Rights Access in the United States, makes is to pursue more aggressive enforcement measures addressing states’ efforts to limit minority voters. The reasons it cites for disfranchisement are: voter identification laws, voter roll purges, proof of citizenship measures, challenges to voter eligibility, and polling places moves or closings.
Many of these are issues that PILF has fought against due to the rampant abuses in voter registration and polling verification, which have allowed thousands of illegal immigrants and other non-eligible citizens to cast ballots.
“The [USCCR] report reads more like a ‘Get Out the Vote’ flyer designed to benefit partisan turnout than a careful and credible report on voting,” Adams said. “That’s a shame, and President Trump will have to very carefully examine who serves on and works for this Commission when he has the ability to appoint replacement Commissioners.”
In a previous lawsuit, PILF estimated that a ‘glitch’ in the “Motor Voter” registration through Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation had put more than 100,000 ineligible voters on the rolls. However, many jurisdictions actively resist providing data about suspected voter fraud.
In a press release disputing many of the USCCR report’s details, PILF listed seven major errors, including a false claim that the board voted unanimously on its recommendations and its use of a George Soros-funded “news” operation to support claims that there was no substantial evidence of voter fraud.
Adams said that the brazen partisanship on the commission risked undermining its credibility and damaging overall public perception of civil rights and the Voting Rights Act.
“One of the most effective ways to preserve the viability of civil rights laws is to remove partisan politics from civil rights enforcement. As soon as a sizeable segment of the public believes that civil rights laws are being leveraged for partisan ends, a sizeable segment of the public will stop supporting civil rights,” he said.
“The Voting Rights Act has enjoyed broad bipartisan support for decades. But if enforcement of the law is hijacked by partisan interests, the law will lose this bipartisan support.”