“Citing Trump’s voter fraud lie, states are working to make it harder to vote”

Important Kira Lerner at Think Progress;

At the annual gathering of secretaries of state in Washington, D.C. this week, Republican elections chiefs blocked an attempt to official denounceTrump’s lie. Instead, they cited the president’s claims, telling ThinkProgress they support measures like voter ID laws, cuts to same-day registration, and efforts to make it harder to register to vote.

Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State repeated the White House’s unsubstantiated claim that thousands of out-of-state citizens cast ballots in New Hampshire, potentially handing the state to Hillary Clinton. New Hampshire’s Secretary of State defended his state’s voter accessibility while his legislature pushes for a measure that would potentially block thousands of college students from casting ballots. And Nevada’s Secretary of State said she supports voter ID laws because she has never had a problem showing an ID to vote….

Voting experts have repeated since the election that there is no proof of fraud on the level that Trump has claimed. At the National Association of Secretaries of State convention, David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, reminded the attendees that if massive fraud had occurred, they would be the first to know.

“There is a system of checks and balances in place,” he said during a panel on trust in elections. “We all know in this room that if there were massive voter registration fraud, we would have seen large numbers of flagged records that didn’t match DMV records or social security records, that we would have seen unusual levels of activity we hadn’t seen before, that we would have seen large numbers of requests for out of state mail ballots that we hadn’t seen before.”

None of that occurred, but that hasn’t stopped elections chiefs from crying fraud.

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