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A woman drops her ballot during the presidential election at LA County Registrar Office in Norwalk, California, U.S., November 8, 2016. Mario Anzuoni/REUTERS

A New York Times op-ed Wednesday titled “The Voter Purges Are Coming” warned there could be voter suppression ahead of the first meeting of President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The panel faced credibility problems because it was formed after Trump claimed as many as 5 million people voted illegally in the presidential election, robbing him of a popular election vote. The accusation is currently unfounded, according to NPR, Wednesday.

The title of the piece, meant as a warning by author Vanita Gupta, became a rallying call on the right.

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The commission is headed by two Republicans, Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. The panel’s first step was to ask all 50 states for detailed voter roll information including names, voter history and last four digits of social security numbers. The commission said the information was to investigate fraud. Many states refused to comply fully or gave only limited data.

“They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” said Mississippi's Republican Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann about the request.

Critics of the commission fear that the effort to investigate fraud will actually be used to suppress minority voters.

“Here’s how the government will use voters’ data. It will create a national database to try to find things like double-voters. But the commission won’t be able to tell two people with the same name and birthday apart. Such errors will hit communities of color the hardest. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of the 100 most common last names,” wrote Gupta.

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“It’s fatally flawed from the design,” said Dale Ho, the director of the voting rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union, to the New York Times Wednesday. “The commission didn’t arise out of concerns about access to the ballot or error in tabulation by voting machines. It emerged out of Trump’s tweet that he won the popular vote. When you know that and the personnel on the commission, you don’t need to know anything else.”

The group already faces seven lawsuits, according to the Times.

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