News reports claiming that 44 states have refused President Trump’s Election Integrity Commission’s request for voter data are “fake news,” the vice chairman of the commission declared on Wednesday.

In a statement released by the White House, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said only fourteen states have actually refused thus far.

“At present, 20 states have agreed to provide the publicly available information requested by the Commission and another 16 states are reviewing which information can be released under their state laws,” Kobach wrote. “In all, 36 states have either agreed or are considering participating with the Commission’s work to ensure the integrity of the American electoral system.” The vice chairman concluded:

While there are news reports that 44 states have “refused” to provide voter information to the Commission, these reports are patently false, more “fake news.” At present, only 14 states and the District of Columbia have refused the Commission’s request for publicly available voter information. Despite media distortions and obstruction by a handful of state politicians, this bipartisan commission on election integrity will continue its work to gather the facts through public records requests to ensure the integrity of each American’s vote because the public has a right to know.

News outlets that made the “44 states” false claim include CNN, NBC, The Week, Forbes, Vox, NY Daily News, Mic, CBS, and Yahoo.

On CNN’s “New Day” Wednesday morning, co-host Chris Cuomo said that Trump’s allegation of voter fraud is “B.S.”:

“Is there a second line to this story in terms of what this commission is about other than the obvious, which is trying to put meat on the bones of a B.S. allegation?” CNN Political Commentator Errol Louis agreed, saying it is worse than that. The real objective of the administration’s voter fraud commission is voter suppression.

After the election Trump claimed that he would have won the popular vote if “the millions of people who voted illegally” were deducted.

Democrats really want that to be a “B.S. allegation.” But is it? From NewsBusters:

The Daily Signal has reported on the many cases of voter fraud and other studies have found that there are potentially large amounts of noncitizens registered to vote. An Old Dominion University study found that noncitizen voting “is at times substantial enough to change important election outcomes including Electoral College votes and Senate races.” As Tom Fitton points out, using this study’s math, 1.41 million noncitizens would have voted in 2016. The Pew Center’s 2012 election survey found that: “Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.” “More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as active voters.” “Approximately 2.75 million people have active registrations in more than one state.” Additionally, as the Washington Times reports, investigations in Maryland and Virgina have found thousands of aliens registered to vote.

The numbers coming out of states like California, Texas, and Arizona are particularly troubling, The Sentinel’s Jack Cashill has noticed.

The California numbers in particular defy easy explanation. In the 2012 popular vote, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by 3.9 percent nationwide. In the 2016 popular vote, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 2.1 percent nationwide. Although 7.5 million more people voted in 2016 than in 2012, Obama received more raw votes than Hillary Clinton did. Yet despite this nationwide Democratic loss of 1.8 percent from the 2012 count, in California Clinton received nearly a million more votes than Obama had in 2012, a 7 percent net Democratic gain. This massive gain in California makes even less sense given that neither the presidential race nor the U. S. Senate race in that state was ever in doubt. So where did the million extra Democratic California voters come from? The media encourage their followers to think that fear and loathing of Donald Trump among Hispanics shifted the account balance Hillary’s way, but exit polls suggest otherwise. According to Pew, a liberal but generally reliable source, Hillary fell 5 percentage points short of Obama’s 2012 numbers among Hispanics nationwide. Also according to Pew California and Texas are the two states with the most illegal immigrants, California with an estimated 2.35 million and Texas with an estimated 1.65 million. These are the two states in which Hillary showed the biggest gain over Obama’s 2012 number, 7.0 percent in California, 6.8 percent in Texas. In Arizona, which also has a high concentration of illegal immigrants from Mexico and points south, Hillary outperformed Obama by 5.5 points. In only twelve states did Hillary outperform Obama, and only in these three did she outperform him by more than 5 percentage points.

California Senate Leader Kevin de Leon, a Democrat, admitted, “Anyone who has family members who are undocumented knows that almost entirely everybody has secured some sort of false identification.”

Given the laxity of controls, it should not be a surprise that according to a 2013 McLaughlin & Associates scientific bilingual poll of Hispanic adults 13 percent of the non-citizens reported they were registered to vote. And these numbers are probably lower than they ought to be. In a 2008 Harvard/YouGov survey, for instance, 14 percent of self-declared non-citizens who said they were not registered to vote were found to be registered when matched to a database of consumer and voting data. The think tank Just Facts argues that 800,000 to 2.2 million non-citizen Hispanics stated they were registered to vote in 2013. There is no reason to believe the number was any less than that in 2016. If Just Facts is right, these voters would seem to be concentrated in those states with large, easily organized clusters of people from Mexico. In states with more heterogeneous illegal populations like Florida and New York. Hillary fell short of Obama’s numbers.

If Kobach’s critics have a good explanation for these vote shifts other than illegal voting, we’d all love to hear it.

Meanwhile, the Election Integrity Commission’s work continues and its vice chairman isn’t backing down.

“The information that we asked for… is just the basic identifying information that’s already publicly available,” he recently told Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “Anybody on the street can go into a county election office and get the voter rolls. … There’s no security risk.”

Kobach suggested that people on the left who say “we don’t want the commission to see our voter rolls” have something to hide.

He pointed out that hundreds of candidates and organizations buy voter rolls each election cycle in any given state.

Robert Popper, director of Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project, backed Kobach up. “Trump’s Election Integrity Commission has asked states for their voter rolls in order to collect data on voter registration practices,” he said. “What people need to understand is that this is a very ordinary request. We at Judicial Watch routinely ask states for their voter registration rolls–and we get them.”

One thing that has never been done, but is very important, according to Kobach, is cross-checking the names of 15 to 20 million aliens who are living in the United States on green cards or temporary visas. Officials have never been allowed to check to see how many of the aliens have registered in their states.

“The number is likely to be very high,” Kobach said.

https://youtu.be/owmpK25Ip3s