WISCONSIN – President Trump issued a new election related executive order yesterday calling on the Department of Homeland Security alongside the Social Security Administration to create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters. The move is the latest in a string of attempts to exert federal authority over a power that resides with states – the administration of our elecitons.
Recent polling from Marquette University Law School found that 79% of Wisconsinites trust state and local officials to handle administration of election processes over federal officials, including 61% of Republicans. Independents polled also outperformed the average, coming in at 80% who trust state and local officials more than federal officials to manage elections.
State officials wrestle with the additional uncertainty these orders and the subsequent court challenges create, whlie the orders themselves only create more distrust in a system that has shown repeatedly in Wisconsin to be safe, secure, and capable of rooting out bad actors.
The Wisconsin board of the Democracy Defense Project released the following statement in response to this latest executive order:
“The latest executive order from Washington oversteps the boundaries laid out by the constitution yet again, as well as creates more distrust in our electoral system. Election administrators in the state of Wisconsin are within the 10 day period requiring a public test of voting systems for the sake of transparency and accuracy. We would encourage the President and anyone that harbors doubts about the way Wisconsin runs elections to attend one of these public tests and see for themselves the safeguards our election administrators have in place. We can all but guarantee our adminstrators will manage mail ballots more securely than the Postal Service would. “
More information on the Democracy Defense Project can be found at https://www.democracydefenseproject.org/wi.
Media Contact: Justin Giorgio, jg@k2andcompany.com
