Kris William Kobach is an American lawyer and politician who is the Attorney General of Kansas. He previously served as the 31st Secretary of State of Kansas. A former Chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, Kobach came to national prominence over his support for immigration controls, including involvement in the implementation of high-profile anti-illegal immigration ordinances in various American cities. Kobach is also known for his calls for stronger voter ID laws in the United States, reinstating the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, and his advocacy for anti-abortion legislation. He has made claims about the extent of voter fraud in the United States that studies and fact-checkers have concluded are false or unsubstantiated.
Hans Anatol von Spakovsky is an American attorney and a former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). He is the manager of The Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. He is an advocate for more restrictive voting laws. He has been described as playing an influential role in making unfounded concern about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party.
Marc Rotenberg is president and founder of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, an independent non-profit organization, incorporated in Washington, D.C. Rotenberg is the editor of The AI Policy Sourcebook, a member of the OECD Expert Group on AI, and helped draft the Universal Guidelines for AI. He teaches the GDPR and privacy law at Georgetown Law and is coauthor of Privacy Law and Society and The Privacy Law Sourcebook (2020). Rotenberg is a founding board member and former chair of the Public Interest Registry, which manages the .ORG domain.
John Christian Adams is an American attorney and conservative activist formerly employed by the United States Department of Justice under the George W. Bush administration. Since leaving the DOJ, Adams has become notable for making alarmist and false claims about the extent of voter fraud in the United States. He has falsely accused a number of legitimate voters of being fraudulent, and has published information about them online, including Social Security numbers.
William "Bill" Edward Binney is a former intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and whistleblower. He retired on October 31, 2001, after more than 30 years with the agency.
Voter suppression in the United States consists of various legal and illegal efforts to prevent eligible citizens from exercising their right to vote. Such voter suppression efforts vary by state, local government, precinct, and election. Voter suppression has historically been used for racial, economic, gender, age and disability discrimination. After the American Civil War, all African-American men were granted voting rights, but poll taxes or language tests were used to limit and suppress the ability to register or cast a ballot. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 improved voting access significantly.
Voter impersonation, also sometimes called in-person voter fraud, is a form of electoral fraud in which a person who is eligible to vote in an election votes more than once, or a person who is not eligible to vote does so by voting under the name of an eligible voter. In the United States, voter ID laws have been enacted in a number of states by Republican legislatures and governors since 2010 with the purported aim of preventing voter impersonation. Existing research and evidence shows that voter impersonation is extremely rare. Between 2000 and 2014, there were only 31 documented instances of voter impersonation. There is no evidence that it has changed the result of any election. In April 2020, a voter fraud study covering 20 years by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found the level of mail-in ballot fraud "exceedingly rare" since it occurs only in "0.00006 percent" of individual votes nationally, and, in one state, "0.000004 percent — about five times less likely than getting hit by lightning in the United States."
The 2016 United States presidential election in New Hampshire was held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, as part of the 2016 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. New Hampshire voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote, pitting the Republican Party's nominee, businessman Donald Trump, and running mate Indiana Governor Mike Pence against Democratic Party nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and her running mate Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. New Hampshire has four electoral votes in the Electoral College.
John Robert "Jay" Ashcroft is an American attorney, engineer and politician serving as the 40th and current Secretary of State of Missouri since 2017. A member of the Republican Party, he is the son of former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck was a database in the United States which aggregated voter registration records from multiple states to identify voters who may have registered or voted in two or more states. Crosscheck was developed in 2005 by Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh in conjunction with Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska. In December 2019, the program was suspended indefinitely as part of a settlement of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas challenging Kansas' management of the program. Prior to Crosscheck's legally mandated suspension, a dozen states had withdrawn from the program citing the inaccurate data and risk of violating voters' privacy rights. Crosscheck was also accused of facilitating unlawful purges of voters in a racially discriminatory manner.
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, also called the Voter Fraud Commission, was a Presidential Commission established by Donald Trump that ran from May 11, 2017, to January 3, 2018. The Trump administration said the commission would review claims of voter fraud, improper registration, and voter suppression. The establishment of the commission followed Trump's false claim that millions of illegal immigrants had voted in the 2016 presidential election, costing him the popular vote. Vice President Mike Pence was chosen as chair of the commission and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was its vice chair and day-to-day administrator.
American Civil Liberties Union v. Trump and Pence, No. 1:17-cv-01351, is a case pending before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The plaintiffs, the watchdog group American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), alleges that the defendants, President Donald Trump and the Vice President Michael Pence, are in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act by establishing the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity for the purpose of supporting the President's "claim that he won the popular vote in the 2016 election—once millions of supposedly illegal votes are subtracted from the count."
NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. v. Trump, No. 1:17-cv-05427-ALC, was a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, The Ordinary People Society, and a coalition of civil rights groups alleged that the defendants, President Donald Trump, the Vice President Michael Pence, and Kris Kobach were in violation of the Fifth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Federal Advisory Committee Act by establishing the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (PEIC) for the purpose of intentionally discriminating against Black and Latino voters in violation of the Fifth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
Fish v. Kobach was a 2018 bench trial in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas in which five Kansas residents and the League of Women Voters contested the legality of the Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC) requirement of the Kansas Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) Act, which was enacted in 2011 and took effect in 2013.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is an American conservative legal group based in Alexandria, Virginia, which is known for suing states and local governments to purge voters from election rolls. The nonprofit was constituted in 2012.
After the 2020 United States presidential election, the campaign for incumbent President Donald Trump and others filed and lost 62 lawsuits contesting election processes, vote counting, and the vote certification process in 9 states and the District of Columbia. Among the judges who dismissed the lawsuits were some appointed by Trump himself.
After Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election, Republican nominee and then-incumbent President Donald Trump pursued an unprecedented effort to overturn the election, with support and assistance from his campaign, proxies, political allies, and many of his supporters. These efforts culminated in the January 6 United States Capitol attack by Trump supporters, which was widely described as an attempted coup d'état. One week later, Trump was impeached for incitement of insurrection but was acquitted by the Senate by a vote of 57–43, 10 votes short of the 67 votes required to convict him.
Following the results of the 2020 United States presidential election, an obstruction scheme was devised by 45th U.S. president Donald Trump and his allies in seven key swing states to create and submit fraudulent certificates of ascertainment that falsely asserted Trump had won the electoral college vote in those states. The intent of the scheme was to pass the fraudulent certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This effort was predicated on a fringe legal theory outlined by Trump attorney John Eastman in the Eastman memos, which claimed the vice president has constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. This scheme infamously came to be known as the Pence Card.
The election denial movement adheres to a widespread Republican belief that any American election not resulting in a desired Republican candidate's victory has been rigged or stolen through fraud. The movement originated with Donald Trump's false and persistent assertions that he had won the 2020 presidential election, which led him and his associates to take actions to attempt to overthrow the election of Joe Biden, for which they were indicted on federal and state charges. Trump's false claims of a stolen election came to be known as Trump's "big lie".
