ACLU Sues Trump Over Election Commission

The suit claims the presidential commission’s lack of transparency is illegal.

Olivier Douliery/CNP via ZUMA Wire

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Two groups filed lawsuits against the Trump administration in federal court on Monday, alleging that his election commission is violating federal law by operating without transparency.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit against President Donald Trump, as well as his commission and Vice President Mike Pence, who chairs the body. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal and civil rights nonprofit, filed a separate suit against multiple members of the administration and commission.

Shortly after becoming president in January, Trump claimed that 3 to 5 million people had voted illegally and promised to create a commission on the integrity of the voting system, ostensibly to prove his unfounded claims of mass fraud. In May, Trump signed an executive order creating this commission. He named Vice President Mike Pence as the group’s chair and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is known as a crusader against voter fraud despite evidence that it is virtually nonexistent, as vice chair. In June, the commission created an uproar when Kobach sent letters to all 50 states requesting extensive personal information from states’ voter files. Nearly all states have refused to comply in full with the request.

“The commission held its first meeting without notice or making it open to the public,” Theresa Lee, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a press release announcing the group’s suit. “This process is cloaked in secrecy, raising serious concerns about its credibility and intent. What are they trying to hide?” 

The ACLU alleges that the commission is violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act, passed in 1972 to create guidance and public accountability for these committees, in two ways. First, the complaint claims that the commission is violating the requirement that committees hold their meetings publicly and make their meeting notes and other materials public. The commission’s first and only meeting so far, the ACLU notes, was not available to the public and took place without prior public notice. The second meeting, the complaint says, “is now scheduled to take place in a building generally inaccessible to the public, and none of the documents already relied upon by the Commission have been made available to the public.” 

The ACLU also alleges that the membership of the commission violates the same law, which stipulates that membership be “fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented.” According to the ACLU, of the initial six appointees to the committee, at least four “have a record of making exaggerated and/or baseless claims about voter fraud, and/or have implemented or supported policies that have unlawfully disenfranchised voters.” Among them is Kobach, who has erected roadblocks to registering to vote in his state and created a interstate system called Crosscheck to find people registered in more than one state. The program has been criticized for generating false positives and causing legitimate voters to be removed from the rolls. 

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is asking the court for a temporary restraining order to halt the commission’s next meeting, scheduled for July 19, until the commission makes its records and meetings available to the public. 

A spokesman for the vice president did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This story has been updated to include the lawsuit from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate