Thom Hartmann, the author of a new book on voter suppression, said Tuesday the barriers to voting are getting increasingly difficult because of what he called a “made up” issue over concerns of non-citizens voting with fake IDs.
“The barriers are getting more and more rigorous,” Hartmann told Hill.TV’s “Rising” Tuesday.
Hartmann is the author of “The Hidden History of the War on Voting,” which was published earlier this month.
“We used to have a system of … something called biometrics. You would sign a card when you first registered to vote and then they would compare your signature,” he said. “Signatures are actually, when they’re done, live in front of another person, harder to fake than it is to buy a fake ID.”
Hartmann said during former President George W. Bush’s administration the government spent millions of dollars in a two-year “brouhaha” searching for instances of voter fraud over concerns that non-citizens were voting.
Just 35 people were found, and none of them had voted using a fake ID, Hartmann said.
“This is a made up thing to justify purging, or preventing people, making it harder for people to vote,” he said, adding that people living in big cities, students living out of state, and older citizens often don’t have current driver’s licenses which poses a barrier to vote based on certain state requirements.
President Trump has repeatedly made claims about voter fraud, even enacting a voting integrity commission in 2016 just after the general election. However, the commission found no evidence of widespread voter fraud, according to a report from The Associated Press.
Federal Election Commission Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub has also quelled these claims of illegal voting.
Many Democrats have pledged to fight voter suppression across the country leading into the November 2020 elections.
Notably, Georgia Democrat and former candidate Stacey Abrams, who credits voter suppression for her 2018 gubernatorial loss, launched an organization called Fair Fight 2020 with the goal of fighting voter suppression across the the country.
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