Many are surprised that a voter's registration information is not private. That's right: Anyone can find out a voter's party affiliation, place of residence and some other basic information merely by requesting it at the local voter registration office. In fact, for $20, a person can find this information for any registered voter in Pennsylvania.

Now, presumably to confront "massive" voter fraud across the nation, President Donald Trump has commissioned an advisory board on election integrity to seek not only the information that is public, but it also wants additional information, which has resulted in a backlash from a majority of the states, including Pennsylvania.Gov. Tom Wolf sent a letter to the commission saying that the commonwealth will not comply with the request. Wolf is concerned about privacy and the possibility that the material could be used to suppress voter turnout.Wolf has been critical of Trump's unproven claims that millions of votes were cast illegally in the 2016 presidential election. As a result, Trump contends, he lost the popular vote, even though he won the presidency by taking the Electoral College vote with ease. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton had nearly 3 million more popular votes than Trump, a result that the president has found difficult to come to terms with."The right to vote is absolute and I have no confidence that you seek to bolster it," the governor wrote to Kris Kobach, commission vice chairman and former Kansas Secretary of State who has championed voter-fraud action in that Midwestern state. "Voter suppression is undemocratic, and I will not allow Pennsylvania to participate in this process to further the trend of suppression seen across the country."As of last count, about 30 states have refused to participate for various reasons. Among them is New York. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has been up to his eyeballs with issues involving a three-day state shutdown, has not decided whether the Garden State will comply.Along with anyone else, the commission can purchase publicly available voter information, but Pennsylvania law prevents its being posted online or used for commercial reasons.In addition to the publicly available information, the commission also is seeking birth dates and partial Social Security and driver's license numbers.Wolf and a number of other state officials question the motives behind the request. Wolf, a Democrat, has been critical of Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania both before and after the election. He said Trump has persisted in these claims although he has provided not a shred of evidence."These attacks on Pennsylvania and the country's most important democratic institution - voting - remain unproven," Wolf said. He reminded Kobach that in Pennsylvania a court has struck down a voter-identification program.In May 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and other groups filed a lawsuit in Commonwealth Court to overturn the voter ID law recently signed by then-Gov. Tom Corbett. The law was permanently blocked in the spring of 2014 after Corbett declined to appeal a federal judge's ruling that the law was unconstitutional.It is revealing that during the voter ID case, the commonwealth admitted that it could not identify even one instance in which a person voted improperly in Pennsylvania by impersonating someone else at the polling place.Examples of widespread in-person voter fraud are rare these days because of stronger polling site safeguards and oversight. In a 2014 study, Loyola University Law School professor Justin Levitt found 31 possible instances of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion ballots cast during a 14-year period (2000-2014). Just one was in Pennsylvania.Wolf also said that he would be more interested in hearing how the White House is protecting state elections from outside illegal influence from hackers foreign countries. "I would support any effort to invest more federal funding in protecting our voter systems and improving voting technology," Wolf wrote to Kobach.Some states were quite pointed in their refusal to provide the requested information. Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, said he won't turn over any information to the panel, telling members of the voter-fraud commission to, "go jump in the Gulf of Mexico."Trump set the tone for his contention of voter fraud when he brought it up at a rally in south-central Pennsylvania during the presidential campaign. He told his supporters to be on the lookout for cheating at the polls on Nov. 8 and announced that if he lost Pennsylvania it would be caused by voter fraud. Trump won the state by fewer than 50,000 votes and took all 20 electoral votes.At the time of Trump's declaration, he was trailing Clinton by about 9 or 10 percentage points on several major statewide polls. He called on volunteers to be poll-watchers and even encouraged law enforcement officers, such as sheriffs, police chiefs and "everybody" to be on the lookout for voter fraud and impersonation. Based on the evidence, we see no reason why there should even be such a presidential advisory commission to look into what appears to be a nonexistent issue. As a result, we support Gov. Wolf's position, because the premise of widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania is faulty and inaccurate.By Bruce Frassinelli |

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