Sure, Trump, go ahead and take every state’s voter rolls and federalize them.
As soon as you do the same thing for gun owners.
Deal? That’s basically the whole idea. Maybe this should have been a tweet. But hey, here is some data.
The Election Integrity Commission was started by Donald Trump in March to find those 3–5 million illegal immigrants that don’t exist and voted fraudulently. When you’re president, you get to invent conspiracy theories and then create commissions to investigate them.
But back to guns. Right now, it is illegal to keep a national register of firearm owners. This is a) hysterical and counterintuitive, and b) something that would really, really help fix the illegal sale and interstate movement of guns. It would also help track whether someone who owns a gun was, say, an inpatient at a mental health facility. But we do not have a national register of gun owners. Here is Jeanne Marie Laskas writing for GQ:
There is no national database of guns. We have no centralized record of who owns all the firearms we so vigorously debate, no hard data regarding how many people own them, how many of them are bought or sold, or how many even exist.
The National Trace Center, which is where you go when you want to see who owns that gun you’ve found, is not allowed to have centralized computer data.
Once more, because no, that isn’t a typo. The National Trace Center is prohibited by law from having computer data. It can’t do what the public library does for books.
Why? Because FREEDOM, God Damnit. The Firearm Owners’ Protection Act did this, in 1986. God Bless.
There were four cases of voter fraud last year. This is a solution in search of a problem. There is not a problem with people voting fraudulently. And if there were, the kind of voter fraud that could be the mostcommon would not be rooted out with a national database.
And plus, FREEDOM, man. Wayne La Pierre himself, head of the NRA, the group that was elbow-deep in the fight to prevent a national registry, said this:
There are only two reasons for that federal list […]: to tax them or take them.
You’re right, Wayne La Pierre. The only reason why they want a voter registry is to make it harder to vote.
The Election Integrity Commission wants not just your name, your date of birth, and your Social Security Number. It also wants your party affiliation. Not only is it illegal anyway to hand over that information, it’s also so completely an authoritarian intimidation tactic, I can’t even.
Also, there’s this. Every computer science expert I’ve asked has said the same thing: America’s disperse, varying, often Byzantine system of voter rolls and tabulation was the main thing that protected us from a coordinated external attack.
The fact that Kentucky has one type of voting machine and Illinois has another, both counted differently, and both kept in different databases protected by a 85 year old man wearing a green dealer’s visor and sleeve garters means that Putin has to do not one hack, but 50 different hacks, none of which has a real chance of affecting an election outcome. Also, the commission asked states to email them all your sensitive information. Email. So there’s that as well.
So, it either useless, or more dangerous, than leaving the states to handle elections. And it also has no reason to be. Unless, of course, your reason is not voter fraud, but voter intimidation.
