Confirmed, still denied

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Election integrity remains one of America's most contested political questions.

But what happens when government officials themselves confirm the kinds of problems some commentators insist don’t exist? Here's WORLD commentator Daniel Suhr.

DANIEL SUHR: When President Trump took his case on election integrity directly to the American people last week, he argued in a primetime television address that America’s elections remain vulnerable.

Many news channels either declined to air the speech altogether or surrounded it with heavy “context”—meaning, commentary from anchors rebutting, or even pre-butting, the president’s claims.

Before Trump had even begun speaking, CNN’s John King told viewers:

KING: We’re gonna be watching and listening to what he says tonight and we will bring you any breaking news ASAP. But we are not going to take the president’s speech live. That’s because of this president’s history of misleading, in some cases false, statements on the subject of elections and election integrity.

False statements?

One of Trump’s central claims was actually pretty simple:

TRUMP: Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls. And yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail.

Then, as if on cue, New Jersey’s Democratic governor acknowledged something remarkable.

She said that because of a computer glitch, the state’s voter rolls contained nearly seven-thousand non-citizens registered to vote. Nearly 400 of them actually cast ballots.

Even so, Governor Mikie Sherrill took the offensive.

SHERRILL: As the Trump administration tries to weaponize elections for political gain, I am ensuring that we protect our elections. Let me be clear: Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity. For the past 10 years, he’s cried wolf and peddled bizarre conspiracy theories about fraud with no evidence.

That’s a remarkable claim to make while announcing that non-citizens had, in fact, been registered to vote—and that hundreds had actually voted.

That’s not an evidence-free conspiracy theory.

New Jersey had just supplied the evidence.

Nor is New Jersey alone.

Or how about the story a few months ago from Kansas, where a non-citizen was not only voting but was serving as the elected mayor of a city? He now faces five years in prison for felonies related to voting as a non-citizen.

Then there’s another government database.

This week, the U.S. Treasury disclosed that it had made payments totaling almost $100 million to dead people.

That’s outrageous in itself. But it also raises an obvious question.

If the federal government struggles to remove the dead from one set of records, why would we assume voter rolls are immune from the same problem?

As America celebrates its 250th birthday, it’s right to celebrate our constitutional republic.

But let’s not forget Benjamin Franklin’s warning still applies: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Keeping it begins with confidence in our elections.

And that starts with clean voter rolls.

For WORLD, I’m Daniel Suhr.

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