Elections

Trump Voter Fraud Investigation Prompts Thousands Of Colorado Voters To Cancel Their Registrations

REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Aislinn Murphy Assistant Managing Editor
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More than 3,000 Colorado voters have canceled their voter registrations after the Trump administration launched a voter fraud probe, according to Newsweek.

State election officials told the Denver Post that 3,394 voters have scratched themselves from the voter roll. Of those who were unregistered, nearly 90 percent were Democrats or independents. Some voters have also requested confidential status, which means their names will be removed when the state releases public voter information.

Though these withdrawals from the voter roll only comprise 0.09 percent of the state’s 3.7 million voters, election officials say they have never seen anything like this.

“In over 12 years of administering elections, I never expected to see a day in the office where we would have more withdrawals than new registrations—and that happened yesterday,” said Amber McReynolds, directors of elections in Denver, in an interview with the Colorado Independent.

The spike in voter withdrawals comes in the wake of the Election Integrity Commission requesting personal voter information—names, addresses, birth year, and party affiliation—from all 50 states last month. The Trump administration created the commission in May to study vulnerabilities in the country’s election system.

County election officials told the Denver Post that voters do not trust Trump’s commission to handle their personal information properly or they didn’t realize how much of their voter registration information was already available to the public.

“It’s my hope that folks who withdrew their registration will reregister, particularly once they realize that no confidential information will be provided and that the parties and presidential candidates already have the same publicly available information from the 2016 election cycle,” said Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams.

Other officials have been less forgiving of the those who have removed themselves from the voter roll. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who co-chairs the commission, maintains that the motivation behind voter withdrawal is voter fraud.

“It could be, actually, people who are not qualified to vote, perhaps someone who is a felon and is disqualified that way, or someone who is not a U.S. citizen,” Kobach told Breitbart. “It could be a political stunt–people who are trying to discredit the Commission and withdrawing temporarily because they are politically active but planning to get back on the voter rolls before the election next November.”

A handful of other states have seen similar requests for deregistration but on a smaller scale, reports NBC News.