CNN host corners GOP senator on Trump's inflated voter fraud claims

Today, while discussing the ongoing battle over election reform, CNN host Brianna Keilar got into it with Senator Jon Husted (R-MI), arguing over whether his proposed voter ID law would do more to prevent fraud or disenfranchise voters.

This came shortly after the Senate voted to reject Husted’s amendment to the SAVE America Act, which if adopted would have required voters to show photo ID when casting ballots. The amendment needed at least 60 votes to move forward but lost 52-47, with no Democrats voting in favor of it.

Appearing just after the defeat on CNN, Husted attempted to argue that Democrats are “unwilling to say yes to the most simple part of election integrity, and that is voter ID.”

This prompted Keilar to bring up the fact that when the Senator was serving as Ohio Secretary of State, his state had a voter ID law that was significantly less restrictive than those proposed by the SAVE Act. At the time, Keilar noted, Husted asserted that Ohio had successfully held “fair, safe, and secure” elections with relatively low ID standards.

“Why is that not acceptable now?” she asked.

Husted then suggested that voter rolls are full of noncitizens, even though such cases have been proven to be exceptionally rare. When Keilar pushed back against his assertion, Husted argued that there had been many purported cases of voter fraud in Ohio, but the CNN host pointed out that only a single person had been convicted of it.

Those vanishingly low fraud numbers, Keilar asserted, did not justify the high number of voters who would be disenfranchised by restrictive voter ID laws, which experts say would be well into the millions.

“You have a lot of people under the SAVE America Act who might not have access to some of these documents,” she noted. “So when you’re talking about broadly instituting these provisions you might leave a lot of people having difficulty voting.”

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