“Responses to a Pence Commission on Voter Fraud”

Important Bauer on how election administration experts should respond to the Pence Commission:

This leaves members of this community with a couple of choices.

One is declining to participate: no testimony, no written submissions. The Commission will want to say that it consulted experts around the country. It will be useful in limiting the harms of this project to show that this is not true. By refusing to support the inquiry, community members will be protected against the linkage of their names to the Commission’s work, a connection accomplished by the mere fact of their showing up.

Or now, prior to the institution of the Commission, members of this same community can respectfully and publicly request that the Administration reconsider this ill-fated venture. If the President or Vice President or Stephen Miller, or all, are worried about the quality of electoral administration, they can support the reform program now in progress in state and local governments, supported by nonpartisan nonprofit organizations. Miller seemed entirely unaware of this work in his remarks on ABC about inaccurate voter registration records, and this is not the only part of the story he is uninformed about. Experts around the country can tell that story, the whole story,in disputing the premise of the proposed Commission.

This public case may not be successful in giving the Administration pause. But it would at least help to shape public judgment of the Commission’s purposes and legitimacy; it would become an indispensable part of its history. And it is the only contribution to that history that experts and officials with names to protect and a serious job to do would want to have anything to do with writing.

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