A20 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, AUGUST 30 , 2019
BY COLBY ITKOWITZ
AND JOHN WAGNERThe Democratic National Com-
mittee officially announced
Thursday the 10 presidential can-
didates who qualified for a spot
on the debate stage in September,
the first in which former vice
president Joe Biden and Sen. Eliz-
abeth Warren (Mass.) will appear
together.
The other 10 candidates still in
the race, many of whom partici-
pated in the first two Democratic
debates, did not meet the more-
stringent requirements intended
to winnow down the participants.
The other eight who will ap-
pear onstage in Houston with
Biden and Warren are Sen. Cory
Booker (N.J); South Bend, Ind.,
Mayor Pete Buttigieg; former
Obama Cabinet secretary Julián
Castro; Sen. Kamala D. Harris
(Calif.); Sen. Amy Klobuchar
(Minn.); former congressman
Beto O’Rourke (Tex.); Sen. Bernie
Sanders (I-Vt.); and tech entre-
preneur Andrew Yang.
The stricter criteria spurred
several candidates who didn’t
make the cut to drop out of the
race, including Sen. Kirsten Gilli-
brand (D-N.Y.), who ended her
campaign Wednesday evening.
Among those who won’t be
appearing but met some of the
requirements are author Mari-
anne Williamson, Rep. Tulsi Gab-
bard (Hawaii) and billionaire ex-
ecutive To m Steyer. The rest of the
candidates met none of the quali-
fications.
To make it on the Sept. 12
debate stage, each candidate
needed at least 2 percent in four
or more approved polls and
130,000 donors from at least 20
states. There needed to be at least
400 donors per state.
The debate is being hosted by
ABC News and also will air on
Univision with Spanish transla-
tion.
It will be the first time that
Biden, who has been leading in
most polls, and Warren, whose
poll numbers have been on the
rise, will appear together on the
same night.
The shrinking of the debate
stage marks the beginning of a
two-tier nominating process,
with some candidates getting
prime-time national exposure
and others left to gut it out in the
early nominating states.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), one of
the hopefuls who fell short of
securing a spot on stage, vowed to
continue his campaign.
“Obviously you want on, but
we’re moving forward,” Ryan said
during an interview on MSNBC.
“This is not going to stop us at a ll.”
Ryan said that he has been
well-received in Iowa, New
Hampshire and other early nomi-
nating states and that there is
plenty of time to win over voters.
“I’m doing it the old-fashioned
way. We’re on the ground,” he
said. “This race is just starting,
not ending.”
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock
was among the other Democratic
candidates who failed to make
the cut who sought to play down
the significance of the develop-
ment.
“There are over 150 days before
voters express their preference in
Iowa and New Hampshire,” he
wrote on Twitter. “It’s those voters
in early states and across the
country who will decide this elec-
tion — no one else.”
Gabbard, meanwhile, took to
Twitter on Thursday morning to
share a clip from an interview on
Fox News the night before in
which she argued that the DNC
debate criteria were not “trans-
parent.”
“No transparency = no trust,”
Gabbard wrote. “With your help,
we will carry our message for-
ward until we finally have a gov-
ernment that stands for the peo-
ple, for our planet, and for peace.
Stand with me.”
DNC officials have defended
the criteria for qualifying in re-
cent days.
“The DNC is asking candidates
to reach 2 percent in four polls,”
spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa
said Wednesday. “ That i s not high
at all. There have been 21 qualify-
ing polls. That is 21 opportunities
to reach 2 percent in four polls.
That is not hard.”
Candidates can continue to
campaign for inclusion in the
October debates, when the quali-
fication rules will be the same.
[email protected]
[email protected]BY AMY GARDNERIt was one of the first claims
President-elect Donald Trump
made about voter fraud in the
wake of his 2016 victory: that his
whisker-thin loss in New Hamp-
shire w as propelled by thousands
of illegal ballots cast by out-of-
state voters.
Trump’s revival of that false
assertion as he ramps up his
reelection campaign is alarming
some New Hampshire Republi-
cans, who fear that the presi-
dent’s allegations could under-
mine confidence in next year’s
election.
“People hold riots after their
favorite football team loses the
Super Bowl,” said Fergus Cullen,
a former New Hampshire GOP
chairman and Trump critic.
“There’s just no telling what
people will do when they’re incit-
ed to it. We’ve never been in a
situation like this, where there’s
so much dry kindling across the
landscape and we’ve got some-
one all too willing to light the
match.”
After losing the popular vote
in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes,
Trump immediately raised the
specter of voting fraud. He al-
leged without evidence that mil-
lions of people voted illegally in
California, Virginia and New
Hampshire — three states where
he lost to Democratic rival Hil-
lary Clinton. He claimed he
would have won the overall pop-
ular vote “if you deduct the
millions of people who voted
illegally.”
“Why i sn’t t he media reporting
on this?” Trump asked in a tweet
on Nov. 27, 2016.
Shortly after his inauguration,
the president announced plans
for a commission to investigate
alleged voter fraud, which ended
up disbanding barely a year later
with no findings.
With his reelection campaign
underway, Trump has returned
to the topic.
“New Hampshire should have
been won last time,” the presi-
dent told reporters on Aug. 15, en
route to a campaign rally in
Manchester, “except we had a lot
of people come in at the last
moment, which was a rather
strange situation. Thousands
and thousands of people coming
in from locations unknown. But I
knew where their location was.”
New Hampshire officials have
said repeatedly that there is no
evidence to support the presi-
dent’s claim. A review by the New
Hampshire secretary of state and
the attorney general’s office of all
6,033 voters who cast ballots in
2016 without proof of a New
Hampshire address verified the
residency of the vast majority of
them and led to a handful of
inquiries into possible improper
voting.
“It is just not accurate” that
thousands of out-of-staters voted
illegally in New Hampshire, Sec-
retary of State Bill Gardner said
in an interview.
Trump’s campaign spokes-
man, Tim Murtaugh, did not
respond to a request for com-
ment.
Some contend that the presi-
dent’s a ccusations pose a particu-
lar threat to New Hampshire’s
jealously guarded spot at the
start of the presidential primary
schedule if he undermines na-
tional confidence in the integrity
of state elections and promptsscrutiny of whether that role
should continue. In turn, the
retail politicking the small state
demands could give way to ex-
pensive campaign advertising in
a bigger state.
“That could ultimately cost
our place in the process,” said
Josh McElveen, a New Hamp-
shire consultant for both parties
who is currently advising Don
Bolduc, a Republican candidate
for U.S. Senate. “I think that
would be bad for New Hamp-
shire, and I think it would be bad
for the country. It would only
make money more influential.”
New Hampshire allows same-
day registration, meaning a voter
can walk into a polling location
on Election Day and register and
cast their ballot all at once.
Thousands of voters show up
at the polls without the proper
proof that they are eligible to
vote. In those cases, voters are
required to sign an affidavit at-
testing to their eligibility.
Over the years, state elections
officials have fielded claims that
out-of-state voters are taking ad-
vantage of same-day registration
on Election Day.
Randal Heller, a political activ-
ist from Barrington, N.H., is an
independent who voted for
Trump in 2016. He said he over-
heard college students waiting
for a polling location to open and
worrying that their photograph
might be taken. Heller said he
shared his concerns with state
Republicans.
“It raises suspicion that per-
haps they are not entitled to be
voting in the state of New Hamp-
shire,” s aid Heller, who is 66 and
a retired naval officer.
But officials have not foundevidence to support such allega-
tions.
Gardner — a Democrat who
was a member of Trump’s now-
disbanded voting fraud commis-
sion — said he has received calls
from voters reporting dozens of
people pouring out of buses with
Massachusetts tags and filing
into voting locations. He said he
has never found evidence of
wide-scale illegal voting; one
time, he learned after following
up on such a tip that the bus was
filled with political science stu-
dents from Wellesley College
who had driven up with their
professor to observe New Hamp-
shire’s first-in-the-nation pri-
maries.
“You’ve got thousands of peo-
ple at polling places with phones,
with cameras, and nobody has a
videotape,” said Cullen, the for-
mer state GOP chair. “I’m re-
minded how there used to be
sightings of Bigfoot and aliens all
the time.”
Kathy Sullivan, a former state
Democratic Party chair, said the
accusations first surfaced when
Democrats started winning
statewide races regularly.
“It was as if New Hampshire
Republicans couldn’t b elieve that
New Hampshire could vote for
Democrats,” Sullivan said. “So
they started claiming that we
were busing people in from Mas-
sachusetts, which of course is a
made-up thing.”
Gardner’s office, along with
the attorney general’s office, re-
viewed all the voter affidavits
signed during the 2016 election.
State officials confirmed the eli-
gibility of the vast majority, pur-
suing only four cases of potential
wrongful voting, according to
their report.
One resulted in a fine. Three
were dismissed after investiga-
tors determined the voters had
attempted to register during hos-
pital s tays, according to the attor-
ney general’s office.
Using a multistate database,
state officials also scrutinized
potential instances of duplicate
voting in New Hampshire and
elsewhere, resulting in five pros-
ecutions. One resulted in a guilty
plea to fraud, while four cases a re
ongoing, the attorney general’s
office said.
State GOP leaders have
stopped short of endorsing
Trump’s c laims, but they cited the
potential for out-of-state voting
when they passed a law last year
requiring voters to comply with
strict residency requirements
such a s getting a New Hampshire
driver’s license and vehicle regis-
tration. Critics have argued in a
pending lawsuit that the law
unfairly targets college students
with the equivalent of a poll tax.
Republican supporters said
that until the measure passed,
college students from out-of-
state were allowed t o vote in New
Hampshire without establishing
the state as their legal residence.
“Look, they didn’t steal it be-
cause the laws allowed them to,”
Gov. Chris Sununu said in an
interview on Boston-based radiohost Howie Carr’s show in Janu-
ary, referring to the 2016 victo-
ries of Clinton and Democratic
Sen. Maggie Hassan in the state.
“We had these very gray, amor-
phous laws that allowed it to
happen. Did they do anything
illegal? No, I don’t think they did
anything illegal. I think we just
had these loopholes that existed,
and they exploited it.”
Sununu added that if the
state’s college students hadn’t
been allowed to participate in the
election, Trump and then-Sen.
Kelly Ayotte would have won “by
a landslide. Yeah. It’s not even
close. Not even close.”
He s aid the new law “fixed” t he
problem — a statement that
Democrats have seized upon as
evidence that the law’s real inten-
tion is to discourage New Hamp-
shire college students from vot-
ing.
Some Republicans who find
Trump’s rhetoric problematic
nevertheless defend the new law.
“I don’t want to limit any-
body’s right to vote, but I also
think that it’s a legitimate thing
to protect, to ensure that only
those people who do have a legal
right to vote are the ones voting,”
said Jennifer Horn, a former
state GOP chair and frequent
Trump critic.
But she added: “We’ve turned
something that should be a basic
American ideal into a partisan
issue, and I think that’s a shame.
And I think this president has
figured out very quickly how to
take advantage of that.”
In the radio interview, Su-
nunu, a n avid Trump fan, indicat-
ed the president is fixated on the
issue of voter fraud in New
Hampshire. “Oh, trust me, he’s
asked me every time” t hey speak,
the governor said.
Trump’s landslide victory in
the New Hampshire primary in
2016, which boosted his cam-
paign after he had lost the Iowa
caucuses to Sen. Te d Cruz (R-
Te x.), has shaped his complicated
relationship with the state.
After Clinton won the state in
the general election by 2,
votes — less than one-half of a
percentage point — Trump im-
mediately questioned the results.
Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s
former 2016 campaign manager,
who is considering a bid for the
U.S. Senate in New Hampshire,
said the new residency law will
make a difference for Trump as
well as the GOP Senate nominee
next year.
“You can’t just walk into the
state of New Hampshire anymore
with a Massachusetts, Vermont
or Maine ID and say, ‘I want to
vote,’ ” Lewandowski said in an
interview. “It was ripe for voter
fraud, and the legislature ad-
dressed that.”
Asked if he was aware of any
instances of such fraud, he said:
“If one person votes illegally in
the state, it’s one person too
many.”
[email protected]Alice Crites contributed to this
report.Tr ump’s false vote-fraud claims worry N.H. GOP
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POSTPresident Trump greets his supporters at a rally at Southern New Hampshire University Arena on Aug. 15 in Manchester, N.H. Before the rally, Trump revived his claims that
thousands of people voted illegally in New Hampshire in 2016. “It is just not accurate,” New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner said of the claims.
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