After he left the Koch brothers’ intelligence operation, Roman showed up running candidate Donald Trump’s “election protection.” Roman
oversaw poll-watching efforts and voter turnout, primarily in the key Electoral College state of Pennsylvania.
Weeks before the 2016 vote, Trump claimed without evidence that dead people and undocumented immigrants were voting in the hotly contested election. Afterwards, he attributed Hillary Clinton’s victory in the popular vote to fraudulent votes — three to five million of them. He said voter fraud was particularly rampant in Philadelphia, St. Louis and Chicago. No evidence for the claim was ever produced.
Trump nevertheless launched an investigation after winning the White House — which quickly folded. That’s in part because 44 states refused to hand over highly sensitive and politically useful information that the commission was requesting. That information included voters’ political party of choice and four digits of their social security numbers. Mississippi’s secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, suggested that the commission “Go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”
In 2011, the Conservative Party of Canada also tried to claim voter fraud was a big problem in Canada — a ruse that gave justification for the Harper government to bring in the Fair Elections Act — a piece of legislation that
critics claimed made it harder to vote and easier to cheat. The Trudeau government has since rescinded major parts of the Conservative legislation.
After the 2016 election, Roman quietly
went to work for the White House as a special assistant, and director of special projects and research.
At the end of April 2018, Roman left the Trump administration. The Republican National Committee now
reportedly is paying him $20,000 a month for “legal and compliance services.” That would be the Mike Roman who once
wrote in a blog entry, “If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it.”
