J Christian Adams has led lawsuits against jurisdictions with large minority populations in an effort to purge voter rolls

Donald Trump has appointed J Christian Adams, a controversial conservative activist, to his election integrity commission.

States fight Trump commission's effort to gather voters' personal data Read more

The panel already contains many of the most vocal advocates for restrictions on voting rights. Adams is a board member of the American Civil Rights Union, a conservative group for which he has led lawsuits against jurisdictions with large minority populations, seeking to force the purging of voter rolls.

Adams has also advocated against automatic voter registration, calling it a partisan vehicle for fraud and claiming: “Voter registration takes forethought and initiative, something lacking in large segments of the Democrat base.”

Adams is best known for his role in promoting the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, after the 2008 election. The case involved two men standing outside a polling place in Philadelphia, one of whom was carrying a night stick. A justice department investigation into whether this constituted voter intimidation became a cause célèbre on the right, largely promoted by Adams.

The case, Adams said, was an example of the Obama administration’s refusal to prosecute civil rights violations by African Americans against whites. In protest, he resigned from a position at the justice department.

Adams subsequently became a minor conservative media personality and wrote a book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, in which he described “how the DOJ has repeatedly sided with political bosses who flagrantly disenfranchise entire communities of white voters”.

His appointment by Trump comes as the election integrity commission, formed in response to the president’s unfounded claim that up to 5m illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election – in which he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by more than 2.5m ballots but won the White House in the electoral college – faces strident opposition from state election officials.

In response to a request by the commission for comprehensive voter roll information, including social security numbers, state election officials have revolted. Some have refused to comply entirely, and others have been willing to provide only information that is publicly available.

The backlash has been bipartisan. The Mississippi secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, said in a statement: “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”

The commission is led by the vice-president, Mike Pence, but its vice-chairman, Kris Kobach, has been the driving force behind it. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state since 2011, is a longtime voter ID advocate who has claimed US elections are rife with illegal ballots cast by undocumented immigrants.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit against the commission, to which Alan Lamar King, an Alabama probate court judge, was also named on Monday.

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