The meeting started with a presentation from Andrew Smith, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, that addressed data challenges in studying voter behavior, elections laws, and turnout. His presentation raised questions about how to interpret elections data and registration data (especially when multiple databases with different population denominators are in use), and the problems with correlating voter-ID policies with decreases in turnout. Smith’s warnings about the fuzziness of elections data made sense, but his data on turnout conflicted with some of the findings of the Government Accountability Office, which found that three of five studies to meet its standard of rigor showed that voter-ID laws specifically decreased turnout of people of color relative to whites.

The opening discussion of data, turnout, and policy mattered deeply to the commission, which was chartered by President Trump in May, and has been dogged by allegations that its true purpose is not eliminating voter fraud, but instigating voter suppression. The argument in favor of the legitimacy of the commission has been weakened by the tendency of Trump and Kobach to commit the logical fallacy of begging the question: They have invoked unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in order to argue for the necessity of a commission to prove that voter fraud exists. And that commission so far—while ostensibly still waiting to analyze numbers from a controversial set of voter data gathered from the states—has simultaneously argued in favor of measures to fight voter fraud, like voter ID, while also arguing that policies to do so won’t suppress votes.

Several of the commissioners and invited guests used fuzzy or opaque data claims not just to further requests to study voter fraud, but to also push anti-voter-fraud legislation. Ken Block, the president of a software firm that used a consumer dataset to match the names and Social Security numbers of voters, claimed that his group was “able to identify with high confidence, several examples of voter fraud” and that “no government agency is looking for voter fraud.” * The accuracy of the latter statement aside—states certify elections results and check for double voters using much more complete datasets than his—Block never detailed the data collection methodology of his proprietary data, which a report shows come from Virtual DBS, a consumer data firm. ** If that dataset contains false duplicates or imputes the wrong Social Security number to two people with identical names, it would create duplicate voters for Block to pick up.

Block’s data was leaned on heavily by other commissioners, including the Heritage Foundation fellow and former elections official Hans von Spakovsky, a grizzled veteran of the quest for the grand voter conspiracy, who also pointed out several other unverified reports of double voting and noncitizen voting, including a group of about 300 people he’d flagged for registering to vote as noncitizens in Fairfax, Virginia, although no investigation materialized. Von Spakovsky expressed his conviction that there are “hundreds, if not thousands of voter-fraud cases that have yet to be investigated.”