Dozens of state election officials from across the country gathered in Boston, striking a business-as-usual tone despite President Donald Trump’s recent claims of shocking vulnerabilities in the election infrastructure. The officials, from 37 states, met for a long-scheduled professional conference, where Trump’s address surfaced little new in terms of evidence.
Reaction from GOP Officials
Several GOP officials scoffed at Trump’s presentation, pointing to the data released by the administration to bolster its case that there are massive numbers of non-citizens voting in US elections. Matt Crane, a Republican who runs the Colorado County Clerks Association, said his team wasn’t convinced by the administration’s findings. A GOP official from a state Trump won three times also panned the speech, saying the declassified intelligence reports posed no new information.
Democratic officials and election experts have condemned Trump for escalating his attacks on the voting process, accusing him of laying groundwork to explain away any potential GOP losses this November. Many Republicans who run elections have been more circumspect in their public comments, broadly expressing support for Trump’s stated goal of cleaning up voter rolls and preventing illegal voting, while defending their record in their states.
Election Security Concerns
The president’s speech last Thursday and a follow-up presentation from the Department of Homeland Security singled out several states that supposedly had staggeringly high numbers of non-citizens on the voter rolls. Trump has long peddled false claims that thousands and perhaps even millions of illegal immigrants are voting in US elections. Isolated cases do exist, but comprehensive studies have concluded that this occurs on a tiny scale.
The administration said it had reviewed public data and uncovered hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on the rolls in Pennsylvania and Nevada, and in California and New Jersey, which are Democratic strongholds. Some officials in those states have called for more transparency, demanding to know how DHS arrived at those numbers.
Original reporting: El Paso News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
