By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--January 8, 2018
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White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t have a decisive answer Thursday on whether the president favored a national voter ID system. “We are still going to continue to review the best way forward,” Sanders said in a response to a question from The Daily Signal during the press briefing. “Just because the election commission is no longer in existence, we are going to send the preliminary findings from the commission to the Department of Homeland Security and make determinations on the best way forward,” she said. Asked why the Department of Homeland Security instead of the Justice Department, which traditionally investigates voting irregularities, is taking up the matter, Sanders told The Daily Signal: “That was the agency that was best determined by the administration, and we are moving forward and letting them take over the process.” Vice President Mike Pence was chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was vice chairman. The president appointed the bipartisan commission, also known as the Voter Fraud Commission, in May. Kobach, a Republican, has been a longtime advocate of voter ID, but will not advise the Department of Homeland Security going forward, a spokesman said.
“At the president’s direction, the department continues to work in support of state governments who are responsible for administering elections, with efforts focused on securing elections against those who seek to undermine the election system or its integrity,” Tyler Houlton, the department’s acting press secretary, told The Daily Signal in an email. “Mr. Kobach is not advising the department on this matter.” The commission’s work was besieged from the outset by lawsuits and uncooperative state officials, according to the White House and some commission members.There's no one, obvious federal agency with oversight over elections because they're run at the state and local level. The FBI would look into criminal activity, but if you're just looking to address a societal trend that involves potential fraud, that's not really a matter that can necessarily lead to specific criminal charges against anyone. That's unless, of course, you discovered that a particular organization - say, the Democratic Party - was engineering fraud on a widespread basis. As far as anyone knows they're only looking at patterns that don't add up, so we're probably not at that stage yet. Even so, isn't the purpose of the Department of Homeland Security supposed to be to coordinate the various federal agencies involved with national security and counterterrorism? How exactly does that relate to voter fraud? I guess the only tangential connection might involve schemes to facilitate voting by illegal aliens, but that still seems rather far afield from the wisely understood mission of DHS. Or was there no other agency Trump trusted to take the matter seriously, given the potential for deep state bureaucrats to bury the whole thing? This is a weird assignment for DHS, for sure. But someone has to address it. And the more Democrats fight the effort, the more it seems important to know for sure if there's really any systemic fraud going on here - and why some people don't want to do anything about it.
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