The Editorial Board

USA TODAY

As the 2018 and 2020 elections approach, federal and state officials ought to be scrambling for ways to prevent a repeat of Russian interference or other meddling in American democracy.

Instead, many are on an obsessive hunt to eradicate phantom problems, such as supposedly massive fraud by non-citizens and people voting in two states.

The upshot is that 54 years after Martin Luther King Jr. appealed for voting rights in his "I Have a Dream" speech, those rights remain under a double-barreled assault:

Restrictive laws approved by Republican legislatures have targeted minorities and poor people by, among other things, demanding specific forms of identification that few have. A federal appeals court overturned North Carolina’s law, finding that it targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.” Last week in Texas, a federal judge ruled that the state’s voter ID law is discriminatory and illegal.

A Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, created in May, seems focused on the president’s absurd claim that he lost the popular vote only because as many as 5 million illegal votes were cast. Never mind that the president’s own lawyers previously argued against a recount in Michigan, stating in a court filing: “All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”

PRESIDENTIAL PANEL MEMBER:'Honor' system for voting is unreliable

Certainly, IDs that citizens are able to easily obtain are a good way to ensure that voters are valid. And any fraudulent voting should be investigated and prosecuted. But instances of such fraud are rare.

Voter fraud shouldn't be confused with the millions of people who move, fail to notify election officials at their old address and end up registered in two places. Others divide their time between homes in different states and are registered in both. But few try to use either circumstance to vote twice.

Despite that, some states, including Kansas, Indiana and Ohio, have purged thousands of voters — nearly half a million in Indiana alone — in legally dubious moves.

The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Ohio’s method, which purged voters whose only sins were failing to vote for six years and not responding to notice that they might be removed from the registration rolls. The case is now headed to the Supreme Court.

Last October, a federal panel in the 10th Circuit blocked the Kansas law, which required people registering at motor vehicle offices to document their citizenship — a mandate that violates federal law. Many eligible voters don’t have a birth certificate or passport.

Appeals Judge Jerome Holmes, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who championed the measure, has “shown only three cases of non-citizens actually voting.” Yet the state denied more than 18,000 citizens the right to vote. That, the court found, is “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.”

Who does Trump pick to co-chair his commission? Kris Kobach.

That decision tainted the commission, scheduled to meet again on Sept. 12, from the start. So did Kobach's sweeping request for voter data — including birth dates and the last four digits of Social Security numbers — from all 50 states. Many of the secretaries of State refused to comply, in part, because that data are considered private in many states. Criticism of Kobach's approach has been bipartisan.

Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, a Republican, told Kobach he’d do more good by working with the 20 states that already have a system to share information that's a “powerful tool” to maintain clean voter rolls.

In a letter to Kobach, Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, a Democrat, suggested that in the face of Russian hacking “the decentralized nature of our electoral system,” in which states hold voter information, provides better security than a national database.

Both are right. All this overblown talk of voter fraud shakes people’s confidence in democratic elections. In a nation where four in 10 eligible voters did not vote in 2016, the government should be working to get more people to vote, not to find ways to turn voters away.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

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