Trump Doesn't Care About Election Integrity—RM Raskin Calls Out Voter Suppression

Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman, welcome to all of our witnesses today. I'm still waiting for my $5,000 doge check, Ms. Crockett, and the $2,000 tariff check. So I'm not sure they're going to be able to- Respectfully, I'm having a little fun here. I think everybody got it except you. Is that right? I don't know why that is, but I'm sorry. Go ahead. Look, the president clearly wants to determine the results of this election by engaging in anything other than just persuasion that he's got a program and he's got policies that will benefit the American people. So they're trying mid-decade gerrymandering, extreme gerrymandering. Even that seems to be boomeranging against them in Texas as a number of the districts that the president thought were going to be custom-made for him to take back Congress now are rejecting that ploy against democracy, voter suppression laws, and of course, extraordinary efforts at executive branch interference with the administration of elections in the states. But the Supreme Court yesterday rejected in a 7-2 decision the president's key gambit of trying to block mail-in balloting in the states, finding that he had no likelihood of success on the merits because, of course, the president simply has no constitutional role in the administration of elections, much less does the post office, other than just to deliver the mails. There's no power to compel the states of the United States to submit their voter lists with all of the private information included to the federal government for the federal government's inspection. And there would be severe and irreparable harm caused by throwing 50 different monkey wrenches into the administration of elections in the last eight weeks. So he could not even get it through what he thought was his safely stacked and packed Supreme Court. So pro-Trump extreme that they dealt him, for the first time in American history, immunity for any felony crimes committed under the auspices of his office. So in some sense, this is over. I'm afraid this hearing is in ideological service of a scheme that was repudiated yesterday in the Supreme Court. It was defeated. My colleagues, to me, appear a little bit like those Confederate soldiers who were off in the forest when the surrendered Appomattox took place, and they just kept fighting for weeks and months. They wanted to convince us that our electoral system is riddled with fraud, and we should turn it over to the 34-count convicted felon fraudster to run our elections instead. That's what's going to work. But it's not working. They have tried to compel dozens and dozens of states to turn over their state voter rolls. The states have rejected it. Both blue states and red states and purple states have rejected it. And the administration has been repudiated in two dozen different courts in this effort. All right. But here we are. What is our last subcommittee hearing in the infamously unproductive 119th Congress about today? It's about a clerical error by the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, a clerical error that was caught not by the U.S. Post Office, not by President Trump and his team of crack prosecutors at the Department of Justice, who've had no fewer than a dozen of their vindictive and selective Trump-ordered political prosecutions and investigations thrown out of court or quashed for people like James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, Maggie Goodlander, Jason Crow, Alyssa Slotkin, or take, for example, my constituent, Davy Hearn, the three-time Olympian, canoeist, and beloved teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland, who was set up on completely bogus, trumped-up charges of felony destruction of federal property because he put his hand in the reflecting pool, and they were looking for someone else to blame for the toxic algae that has spread through the pool because of all of the mismanagement and incompetence of Donald Trump's pool guy from Mar-a-Lago, who got the $16 million insider no-bid contract to work on that. So it was not any of those prosecutors who determined that there was a problem in New Jersey. No, they were working on more important things. No, the clerical error that we convened to discuss today was discovered and announced publicly by the New Jersey state government itself. Federalism in action. And this mistake did not affect the outcome of a single election in New Jersey from borough councilor or township committee person to governor. Some 6,600 New Jersey non-citizen residents were improperly registered to vote for one year because of a software computer error made by the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. These non-citizens had not done anything wrong. The software erroneously placed them on the voter rolls. 400 of them, or 1 in 17, actually voted. There's no evidence that the outcome of any race was swayed by these votes, which constituted less than one hundredth of 1% of the over 4 million votes cast in New Jersey in 2024. It's obviously unacceptable and egregious that even this small mistake occurred. It is federal law that U.S. citizens, and only U.S. citizens, can vote in our federal elections. And the previous New Jersey governor and administration should have informed the public of this blunder sooner, even if mathematically it had no impact, or could have had no impact, on the outcome of any race. But no matter how much our colleagues seek to inflate it, a clerical error is not structural corruption, much less is it a criminal conspiracy. It does not rise to the level of, say, a violent insurrection deliberately incited and organized to overthrow a completed presidential election, or a coercive effort to get the Vice President of the United States to reject the electoral college votes cast by millions of people in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other states. It is not an act of attempted criminal fraud in the voting system, like telling the Secretary of State of Georgia, just find me 11,780 votes. That's not an attempt to block voter fraud, that's an attempt to commit voter fraud. Governor Sherrill, our former colleague here in the House, has been commendably forthcoming about how the mistake in her state occurred, and she is demanding precise answers about the whole snafu. After announcing its existence publicly, her administration has taken aggressive remediation efforts. She's not doubling down on trying to promote voter fraud, she is coming clean about what happened in the past, and is taking aggressive efforts to rectify it to ensure that all voter rolls are accurate today and will be accurate in the future. The state continues to investigate how it happened, contracting with a private law firm to lead an outside investigation headed up by a Republican former U.S. attorney, Jeffrey Chiesa, and it is committed to sharing the results of that investigation with all of the people of New Jersey. If only the Trump administration were as willing to identify and admit its mistakes and try to fix them, rather than doubling down on its errors and its voter suppression schemes with comical lies and bravado. They're still denying that Joe Biden won the election in 2020, where he beat Donald Trump by more than 7 million votes, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, and they continue to lie about that to this day. When the Iran war sent inflationary shockwaves through our economy, driving up gasoline prices by more than a dollar a gallon, Donald Trump never admitted his colossal blunder in going around congressional authority to declare war. It's only the power of Congress to declare war. So he got us into a stupid, self-defeating, counterproductive, costly inflationary war. Have they admitted it? No. They've denied it. They've claimed victory, I don't know, a dozen times. They're all over the map with it. When their ICE agents shot dead two American citizens in cold blood on the streets of Minneapolis, did they admit the mistake and come clean and say, we're going to do a thorough, complete investigation and open up to the public? Not for one second. Is DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who spent hundreds of millions of our dollars on customized jets with bedrooms and full bars and PR stunts like photo shoots of her riding horseback at Mount Rushmore, called the victims of government violence, domestic terrorists, and they have never apologized either for the original act or for defaming the people they killed. You get the point. When over 100 of the January 6th riders, pardoned en masse by Donald Trump, went out and criminally re-offended, including by sexually assaulting and exploiting 12-year-old children, robbing houses with domestic invasions, strangling people, threatening to kill FBI agents, Donald Trump never once confessed his dangerous error or did anything to rectify it. He didn't apologize to anybody. Governor Sherrill is showing how real leaders take responsibility for the mistakes of government. Even if it wasn't her mistake, she takes responsibility for what the government of New Jersey did. That's what we can trust, but we can't trust somebody who just covers it all up. Some people in MAGA want to use this isolated mistake in New Jersey to restrict and blockade the voting rights of millions of Americans. But the facts are clear. Non-citizen voting is exceedingly rare. It's an accident if it does take place overwhelmingly, and it has resulted in the places where it's happened with just as many votes for Donald Trump as for somebody not voting for Donald Trump. But the majority is determined to force through an unnecessary solution to a non-existent problem. They promoted the SAVE Act as the only way to address this imaginary crisis despite every independent analysis, not only confirming that non-citizen voting is remarkably rare, but the SAVE Act would lead to millions of Americans being thrown off of the voter rolls. This drive is not about ensuring the integrity of elections. If it were, Trump would not have gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, would not have disbanded the DOJ and FBI Foreign Influence Threats Task Force, he would not have fired the head of the U.S. Cyber Command. Donald Trump has hollowed out the structural safeguards in our electoral process and will point to the damage he's caused as further proof that our elections cannot be trusted. So this is not about election integrity. This is about his continuing but fortunately foiled plan to try and disrupt and undermine our electoral process before we vote on November 3rd. We encourage all fellow Americans, whatever your politics, whatever your party, to make sure that you exercise your right to vote, including by taking advantage of early voting and mail-in balloting, as Donald Trump himself did in Florida. And do not buy all of the last-minute propaganda and distortion and offensives against American political democracy. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.