On Wednesday's MTP Daily, during a discussion of the Trump administration's Voter Integrity Commission, MSNBC analyst and Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter griped that it is actually a "voter suppression commission" which poses a "threat to democracy." He then warned of America becoming a "banana republic" and asserted that the commission is "trying to rig" the election "for the next time."
At 5:46 p.m. ET, on the July 19 show, after right-leaning MSNBC analyst Michael Steele recalled the complaints about the commission that have come from some state attorneys general, substitute host Katy Tur commented: "People worry about two things. One that, for voter suppression, that this is ultimately what this is about."
After Alter injected, "It is," she continued: "And then, secondly, you know, if he's saying that we don't know if we can trust the results of the 2016 election, what does that mean for the 2020 election?" Alter then complained:
This is such a threat to democracy, this commission, this voter suppression commission, which is what it should be called -- properly called -- because every step they are taking in the queries that they're making to state governments and local governments is all intended to hold down votes -- Democratic votes that they are trying to keep -- people that they're trying to keep from coming to the polls.
He further worried:
The people he's collected in this commission, they all have long histories of voter suppression that go back 20 years. So that's anti-democratic, and raising doubts about the legitimacy of an election is anti-democratic. Both of them undermine the faith that we have in our system that's very, very important for us moving forward. And if we get into a situation like a banana republic situation where every election, nobody believes the returns, we're in a heap of trouble.
As Steele was not making much effort to contribute a conservative point of view into the conversation, in spite of being an analyst from a right-leaning background, host Tur injected some of the conservative point of view: "Again, they just say what they're doing is trying to make sure that everything is fair and done honestly. That's what they say."
After Steele laughed and responded, "The President won, so I don't know what was unfair about the win," the MSNBC host continued:
But the President wanted to find out what was going on with the voter fraud that he claimed existed. He tweeted it out right afterwards -- three to five million people voted illegally, and, "If they didn't do that, I would have won the popular vote," and then he issued an executive order for this voter commission.
Before host Tur closed the discussion to move on to the next topic, Alter got in one final jab at the commission: "No, he's trying to -- he's trying to rig it for the next time."
