198 search results for ""election integrity""

Integrity shmegrity
by Tom Sullivan

When it comes to elections, Republicans are all about election integrity. Except when they’re not.

“There was not a lot of re-litigating of the past,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters Friday after President Trump’s first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tillerson referred to Russian hacking of U.S. election databases and other interference in the 2016 elections:

“I think both of the leaders feel like there’s a lot of things in the past that both of us are unhappy about. We’re unhappy, they’re unhappy,” he said. “What the two Presidents, I think rightly, focused on is how do we move forward. How do we move forward from here, because it’s not clear to me that we will ever come to some agreed-upon resolution of that question between the two nations.”

Integrity shmegrity. 2016 is ancient history.

Putin told reporters in December the hubbub about Russian hacking was simply Democrats looking to blame someone else for their losing. “You have to know how to lose with dignity,” he said. On Friday, a U.S. president who doesn’t know how to win with dignity seemed to concur. Russia may very well have meddled in our elections, Trump told reporters in Warsaw on Thursday, “but I think it could well have been other countries. Nobody really knows … Nobody really knows for sure.” After speaking with Putin, Trump was moving on.

But while the Trump administration talks about getting over it out of one side of its mouth, its Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity continues to press states for detailed voter roll information. Much on its wish list states are prohibited by law from handing over. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, as vice chair of the commission, is tasked with proving Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that three million Americans voted illegally and denied him the popular vote in November. Already the commission faces multiple lawsuits from privacy and government ethics watchdogs.

A hostile state mucking about in U.S. elections? Fugetaboutit! But rumors of millions of imaginary phantom voters require a presidential commission.

The New York Times Editorial Board is not so muddled as Trump about the lack of election security:

The question is this: Can the system be strengthened against cyberattacks in time for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential race? The answer, encouragingly, is that there are concrete steps state and local governments can take right now to improve the security and integrity of their elections. A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice identifies two critical pieces of election infrastructure — aging voting machines and voter registration databases relying on outdated software — that present appealing targets for hackers and yet can be shored up at a reasonable cost.

Last year, Russian hackers tried to break into voter databases in at least 39 states, aiming to alter or delete voter data, and also attempted to take over the computers of more than 100 local election officials before Election Day. There is no evidence that they infiltrated voting machines, but they have succeeded in doing so in other countries, and it’s only a matter of time before they figure it out here. R. James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, wrote in an introduction to the Brennan Center report, “I am confident the Russians will be back, and that they will take what they have learned last year to attempt to inflict even more damage in future elections.”

America’s decentralized election system makes it difficult to hack a national election. That doesn’t mean Russia or other might try to flip local or state elections. The Brennan assessment suggests replacing software and upgrading voting machines to make them auditable might take a few hundred million dollars. “A pittance considering the stakes,” says the Times.

Actual in-person voter fraud looks like people getting caught, writes David Atkins, citing a recent guilty plea by a Trump voter in Iowa:

“Voter fraud” is a term used to scare racist whites by conjuring images of urban minorities coming into their precious bedroom communities en masse by busloads, voting multiple times for fake and deceased people on the rolls. This doesn’t happen, of course, but try telling that to the legions of loyal Fox News watchers. “Voter fraud” is then used as an excuse to ramp up ID and other requirements that disenfranchise the poor, the young and the otherwise disadvantaged to benefit Republican constituencies. It’s no surprise that minorities who get caught voting innocently face far harsher penalties than white conservatives committing knowing fraud.

Which raises the question of how Trump and his colleagues would respond if Vladimir Putin were black?

“Go jump in the Gulf of Mexico”
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Woodlot via Creative Commons.

Every now and then federalism gives states the opportunity to do something more productive than denying citizens Medicaid expansion. This week, state officials across the country told President Donald Trump’s voter fraud czar to take a flying leap.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has established a reputation as the Erich von Däniken of voter fraud. Kobach believes evidence of voter fraud is as widespread as von Däniken’s alien visitations. Chad Lawhorn of the Lawrence Journal-World writes, “[W]hen the subject is illegal voting, Kobach normally becomes like a ‘Game of Thrones’ fan at a cocktail party. You need an actual wizard to get out of that conversation.” The Kansas City Star describes Kobach as a fraud himself.

Kobach’s mission as vice chairman of Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is to locate the three million voters Trump alleges cast illegal ballots last fall to deny him the popular vote. Kobach could start (and finish) looking for them by putting Trump’s head in a magnetic resonance scanner. Instead he sent letters this week to all 50 states requesting detailed voter records:

The letter, signed by commission vice chairman and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), asked for names, addresses, birth dates and party affiliations of registered voters in each state. It also sought felony convictions, military statuses, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting records dating back to 2006, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Hill.

The Department of Justice letter informed states “we are reviewing voter registration list maintenance procedures in each state covered by the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act].” Voting rights watchdog, Ari Berman, writes at The Nation:

While this might sound banal, it’s a clear instruction to states from the federal government to start purging the voting rolls. “Let’s be clear what this letter signals: DOJ Civil Rights is preparing to sue states to force them to trim their voting rolls,” tweeted Sam Bagenstos, the former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Obama administration. There’s a very long and recent history of Republican-controlled states’ purging their voting rolls in inaccurate and discriminatory ways—for example, Florida’s disastrous purge of alleged ex-felons in 2000 could have cost Al Gore the election—and it’s especially serious when the Department of Justice forces them to do it.

“If the Obama administration had asked for this, Kris Kobach would be holding a press conference outside the Capitol to denounce it,” Jason Kander who runs the nonprofit Let America Vote told the Washington Post. Kander is a former Missouri secretary of state.

The response from current secretaries of state has been unenthusiastic as well.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla issued a statement essentially telling Kobach where he could put his request:

“The President’s commission has requested the personal data and the voting history of every American voter–including Californians. As Secretary of State, it is my duty to ensure the integrity of our elections and to protect the voting rights and privacy of our state’s voters. I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally. California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the President, the Vice President, and Mr. Kobach. The President’s Commission is a waste of taxpayer money and a distraction from the real threats to the integrity of our elections today: aging voting systems and documented Russian interference in our elections.”

At least 24 states are pushing back, according to The Hill report, including Vice President Mike Pence’s home state of Indiana. Secretary of State Connie Lawson (R) is president of the National Association of Secretaries of State and on the Kobach commission herself. Lawson said in a statement, “Indiana law doesn’t permit the Secretary of State to provide the personal information requested by Secretary Kobach.” He’ll get name, address, and congressional district, information publicly available.

“They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from,” Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, another Republican, told the commission in his statement. “Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”

From CNN:

“I have no intention of honoring this request,” Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Virginia conducts fair, honest, and democratic elections, and there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in Virginia. This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November. At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.”

McAuliffe’s suspicions likely come from Kobach’s championing his multistate Crosscheck database for sniffing out double registrants and double voting. Kobach wants to use a similar process along with a federal database of legal immigrants to find Trump’s illegal voters. “Crosscheck on steroids,” says Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project:

Researchers have found that Crosscheck’s matching algorithms are highly inaccurate. A recent working paper by researchers at Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Microsoft found that Crosscheck’s algorithm returns about 200 false positives for every one legitimate instance of double registration it finds.

“We’re concerned about unlawful voter purging, which has been something that Kris Kobach has been leading the charge,” said Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

“It’s a real concern that he’s building a nationwide database of voters,” Gupta added. “The question is: How does this data get used?”

An expansion of the Crosscheck system would be “a recipe for massive amounts of error,” according to elections expert Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School. “When you’ve got hundreds of millions of records, and thousands of John Smiths, trying to figure out which of them are your John Smith without making a mistake is well nigh impossible.”

The Washington Post report continues:

“This is an attempt on a grand scale to purport to match voter rolls with other information in an apparent effort to try and show that the voter rolls are inaccurate and use that as a pretext to pass legislation that will make it harder for people to register to vote,” said Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California at Irvine.

If critics needed another reason to doubt, Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation is also on the commission. If Kobach is the Erich von Däniken of voter fraud, Spakovsky is Harold Hill, traveling voter ID salesman. He can deal with this trouble, friends, with a wave of his very hand. Berman writes, “When von Spakovsky was nominated to the FEC, six former lawyers in the voting section called him “the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”

Let’s hope the two confidence men inspire all they are due.

All hands on deck for this one

by digby

It’s hard for me to see how this is constitutional but this is Trump’s America so I’m going to guess that looking at information on every voter in America is probably fine. If they use this information for political purposes, which of course they will because it’s the only reason to do this, is just a first step.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, issued the following statement today in response to news that Kris Kobach, vice-chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, issued letters to Secretaries of State seeking disclosure of identifying information on voters across the country:

“We fully condemn actions taken today by the President’s Election Integrity Commission seeking disclosure of data and personal information on virtually every voter across the country.  This meritless inquisition opens the door for a misguided and ill-advised Commission to take steps to target and harass voters and could lead to purging of the voter rolls. We urge Secretaries of State who received a letter from Kris Kobach to reject this request and discourage state and local officials from participating in this Commission’s dangerous activities.  Today’s action underscores the fact that the Election Integrity Commission is operating in a reckless manner and its activities threaten to have a chilling effect on minority voters.

We encourage the public to contact 866-OUR-VOTE to report complaints or any suspicious activity regarding the activities of the Election Integrity Commission.  We know that voting discrimination and voter suppression are the real threats to American democracy and we will resist the Commission’s attempt to divert federal resources and attention away from these problems.”

Meanwhile, if a foreign government wants to play in our elections be their guest. This is their priority.

The only way they’d ever crack down on cyber-interference would be if Mexico did it.

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Bad faith is policy
by Tom Sullivan

From health care to voting rights to economics, the narrative coming from conservatism’s thought leaders as well as its political ones is professionally disingenuous. But in the faux politeness of the Beltway, rarely does the press call it out as such.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo this week observes how Republican goals rarely conform to their stated ones. Regarding health care, Marshall notes, the press fundamentally (or perhaps deliberately) misreads the intent of the Republican legislation. An exchange between CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash illustrates his point. Why can’t the parties get together on this? Bash asks. Marshall responds:

When you try three times to ‘repeal and replace’ and each time you come up with something that takes away coverage from almost everyone who got it under Obamacare, that’s not an accident or a goof. That is what you’re trying to do. ‘Repeal and replace’ was a slogan that made up for simple ‘repeal’ not being acceptable to a lot of people. But in reality, it’s still repeal. Claw back the taxes, claw back the coverage.

Pretending that both parties just have very different approaches to solving a commonly agreed upon problem is really just a lie. It’s not true. One side is looking for ways to increase the number of people who have real health insurance and thus reasonable access to health care and the other is trying to get the government out of the health care provision business with the inevitable result that the opposite will be the case.

Insisting that the split between the parties on health care policy demonstrates a lack of bipartisanship misses the point.

If you had an old building and one group wanted to refurbish and preserve it and the other wanted to tear it down, it wouldn’t surprise you that the two groups couldn’t work together on a solution. It’s an either/or. You’re trying to do two fundamentally opposite things, diametrically opposed. There’s no basis for cooperation or compromise because the fundamental goal is different. This entire health care debate has essentially been the same. Only the coverage has rarely captured that. That’s a big failure. It also explains why people get confused and even fed up.

Or as Paul Waldman writes of the Republican effort, “[T]his is the party that wants to dismantle government, not figure out how to make it work better.”

The sham politics of bad faith is now policy. Arguments from Republican leaders for any number of policies follow the same pattern. What I wrote here two years ago bears repeating:

My wife calls this having “a Republican argument.” That is to say, a disingenuous one. It’s where your opponent abandons rules of evidence and logic and instead argues by assertion or by exaggerated fear of what “might be” happening undetected.

It is to argue, for example, that eliminating public assistance to the rich through tax cuts, credits, and direct incentives (that fund their fifth home, new yacht, or airplane upgrade) will kill their incentive to work hard and “create jobs.” But public assistance to the poor — you know, for food — eliminates their incentive to work.

It is to argue after every mass shooting that we need no new gun laws criminals will simply ignore; we just need to enforce laws already on the books. Except when it comes to voting restrictions, we need new laws on top of those they complain the state is already not enforcing.

It is people arguing that we need to restore public confidence in the election system after they’ve spent decades trying to undermine it to build public support for restoring Jim Crow.

Lacking evidence of widespread fraud in elections, conservative groups have begun assembling databases of election irregularities to support their case for photo ID laws. The Heritage Foundation has one. But a review reveals that of the 500 cases collected dating back over two decades, only seven involve voter impersonation that might be caught by requiring photo IDs. One of those seven was a voter impersonating another registrant to prove it could be done. Another of the seven involved election judges falsifying the ledger. IDs would not have stopped crooked election judges.

The point of assembling such databases is always the same: to promote the idea the problem is widespread and to build public support for a solution to a virtually nonexistent problem. In the name of “election integrity,” Republican legislatures have erected barriers to voting that “with surgical precision” fall hardest on groups least likely to vote for Republicans. As Marshall says, “that’s not an accident or a goof. That is what you’re trying to do.”

Tort reform is another Republican enthusiasm that pops up from time to time. Like now. Invariably, the sales pitch is that capping medical malpractice awards will “discourage frivolous lawsuits and reduce the cost of health care.” Currently, research shows medical liability makes up 2 to 2.5 percent of health costs. It was under 2 percent in 2005 when President Bush floated the idea of getting hospitals to switch to all-electronic records in a speech at the Cleveland Clinic. It might reduce health care costs by as much as 20 percent as well as save lives. But the effort to save lives and taxpayers money might cost millions. Bush’s colleagues preferred then, as they do now, to focus on the 2 percent solution.

Privatization transfers publicly owned assets to private investors. We the People incur the capital costs; investors reap the profits only available by taking ownership from us. Public-private partnerships promise to save the public tax money up front for new capital projects, but only by charging people in near perpetuity for using the roads/bridges/etc. The promise is always that these schemes will reduce taxpayers’ costs (lower taxes are always implied) but forever seem to cost us more out of pocket.

It is almost as if saving us money, strengthening our democracy, and making us healthier are not the real goals.

The health care bill now on hold in the Senate looks to turn Medicaid into block grants and capping its growth. Speaker Paul Ryan, as we know, has been dreaming about “sending it back to the states, capping its growth rate” since he was in college and “drinking out of a keg.” Making Americans healthier doesn’t really seem to be the driver here any more than saving taxpayers money or boosting election integrity.

If block grants and privatization are such terrific, fiscally conservative ideas, why not auction off a few of our nearly 900 overseas military bases, convert the Pentagon into time shares and condos, and send the defense budget back to the states while capping its growth?

Voting Rights Jeopardy
by Tom Sullivan

“Alex, I’ll take Voting Irregularities for $100.”
It’s the solution to dead people voting.

“What is Voter ID?”

That is the conservatively correct response to every voting irregularity in the category. Dated voter rolls. Felons voting. Clerical errors. Registration errors. Non-citizens voting. Double voting. Machine tampering. Ballot box stuffing. Absentee ballot fraud (a big one). The entire gamut of election irregularities. For voter fraud vigilantes, one non-solution fits all and puts the voting rights of millions of legal voters in jeopardy in pursuit of the ever-elusive, voter imposter. Why is that?

Right-wing media has been flogging the results of an audit of the 2016 election released last week by the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE). Misrepresenting those results helps sell one single product that won’t prevent the overwhelming majority of suspected ineligible votes. On Fox & Friends Sunday April 23, guest J. Christian Adams declared, “The system is broken and needs work.”

Yet the Charlotte Observer Editorial Board concludes:

On Friday, the State Board of Elections released the results of an extensive, objective audit of the 2016 election. It found that 4,769,640 votes were cast in November and that one (1) would probably have been avoided with a voter ID law. One out of nearly 4.8 million.

Let that sink in. In fact, the audit identified 508 suspected cases of inelligible votes. Offsetting those (highlight in the original), “A provisional ballot audit resulted in 428 ballots of eligible voters being counted that would not otherwise have counted.” (They won’t be celebrating that on Fox News.) But before we get to the details, the Republican-led NCSBE is careful not to mischaracterize what the votes flagged as worthy of investigation represent (highlight in the original):

This agency strongly cautions readers not to refer to each of these cases as “voter fraud.” As stated earlier, “ineligible voters casting ballots” may be the result of unintentional or intentional conduct. Fraud, in most cases, is an intent crime that requires prosecutors to show that the voter knowingly committed a crime.

The evidence suggests that participation by ineligible voters is neither rampant nor non-existent in North Carolina. Our audits suggest that in the 2016 general election, approximately 0.01% of ballots were cast by ineligible voters. Most incidents are isolated and uncoordinated, and detecting technical violations does not always prove purposefully unlawful conduct. Our work indicates that ineligible voters are not isolated to one political party or any geographical region of the state.

Contrary to the alarmism on the right about election integrity, a 0.01% error rate would indicate a system that works pretty well, well below the defect rate for consumer electronics, actually. The Observer continues:

About 87 percent of those (441) were felons who voted. State law prohibits felons from voting until their sentence is fully served, including probation and parole. It is believed that many of the felons who voted did not realize they could not vote while on probation.

The probe found 41 non-citizens, from 28 countries, voted. All were here legally, but were not eligible to vote. The audit also found 24 cases of double-voting and two cases of voter impersonation (one by mail and one in person).

The two impersonation cases have been referred to prosecutors. They involve ballots by persons voting the preferences of recently deceased members of the family. (Both were Republicans.) The in-person case is the one identified out of 4.8 million that might have been stopped by a photo ID law.

It’s the solution to non-citizens voting

The Board is also careful to remind readers that these are for the most part only suspected cases of “ineligible voters casting ballots.” They’ve been flagged for further investigation. In many cases, the initial screening proves incorrect.

Investigations on non-citizen cases also have revealed the complexities
of immigration law and citizenship status.

For instance, some individuals achieve citizenship as a matter of law through “derived citizenship” as the child of a naturalized citizen, though paperwork showing that changed status is only available if requested and official databases may not reflect the correct status. An Application for Certificate of Citizenship costs $1,170. Individual contact with affected registrants has also illustrated the limitations of the data. Even where data from the Division of Motor Vehicles, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the voter rolls matched exactly, a high proportion of flagged individuals were citizens.

And since the cases identified to date are all legal immigrants, they would already have government IDs.

It’s the solution to felons voting

As in the cases of felons returning to voting before completing their parole or probation, the Board believes “education and understanding of state law appear to be the primary problem.”

It’s the solution to double voting

The Board rarely encounters cases of double voting, but has flagged 24 records for further investigation. If past experience is any indication, suspected double voting will turn out in a majority of cases (I wrote about one case I know personally here) to be bad data matching or clerical errors:

Detecting double voting and voter impersonation is a time-intensive process. Database matching is not enough, as administrative errors can lead to voter history being assigned to the wrong person — such as when a poll worker checks off the wrong name on the poll book. Instead, data is only the starting point for cases that ultimately involve live interviews
and signature analyses. NCSBE has begun that process on possible instate double voting cases in 2016. This initial review of NC voter registration records indicates that there are a few dozen possible additional cases of double voting; however, this process is still in its preliminary stages and staff have not yet completed review of voter documents to determine whether the match was due to administrative error rather than illegal voting.

The NCSBE offers additional steps it is taking for reducing voting errors to augment deterrents already in place. They involve improved voter education, updated elections software (to check felon status at the time of registration), automated detection of transcription errors in real time, and continued use of the Interstate Crosscheck Program, among others.

But not voter ID, the all-purpose response when “election integrity” advocates play Voting Rights Jeopardy.

Dusk of the Dead revisited
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by La Tête Krançien via Creative Commons.

Zombie lies. They just won’t die. A head shot works for normal zombies, but lies have no heads. [Film idea: headless zombies. How then do the eat brains?] Voter fraud, that really unstoppable zombie lie, gets its genealogy mapped at Politico. The lie’s history goes back decades, but for those just catching up, Lisa Rab begins in 2002. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft sent federal prosecutors on a snipe hunt:

“Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed,” he told the attendees of the Justice Department’s inaugural Voting Integrity Symposium. “Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day.”

Guess what color he imagined those seeking “public relief” were. The same color we all do. We’ve been conditioned to it since at least the Reagan years. Race has been the subtext to voter suppression measures since the days of Jim Crow and literacy tests. Who knows what color Ashcroft thought the zombies were.

The U.S. attorneys found no evidence of any massive conspiracy. By July 2006, they had only 86 convictions to show for over 300 investigations. The Bush Justice Department abruptly fired seven U.S. attorneys that December (and two others later), critics said, for failing to prosecute thin evidence of election fraud. The scandal resulted in a congressional investigation and the resignations of then United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and several others.

But this stuff never goes away no matter how often it’s debunked. In January 2012, S.C. Department of Motor Vehicles director Kevin Shwedo tesified — and got big headlines for saying so (Dusk of the Dead, 2-25-12) — that 950 dead people had voted in the state’s 2010 elections. The Institute for Southern Studies reported the investigation’s findings:

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence where the Voting Dead are concerned. The last I heard, the SCGOP was still looking. Eventually, however, the party’s national branch turned from pursuing the dead to accusing the living. Now it’s non-citizen immigrants behind the alleged widespread and undetectable conspiracy. Plus the threat from people who move from one state but another remain on the voter rolls in their former states for a few years.

In 2014, the Institute for Southern Studies again weighed in on the alleged fraud carried out (somehow) by people registered in two states:

Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies just as quickly debunked the study by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach whose office, after checking 5 million voter records in 2013, “couldn’t provide any evidence of a single instance in which the Interstate Crosscheck’s data had led to an actual legal charge of voter fraud.” Because the data, Kromm writes, “offers no proof such fraud is occurring.” Requiring citizens to present identity cards to vote would have no effect on voting in multiple states.

But millions of dead still on the voter rolls (over two and a half million Americans die each year) and the existence of two-state registrants translates, in Republican minds anyway, to millions of actual votes cast against Republican candidates. Cast by whom, they cannot say, but rest assured they have a mental image of their skin color. President Donald Trump is convinced that 3 million or more voted illegally in 2016 and he’s put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of finding them. Just don’t expect Trump to ask Congress for funding to help states upgrade their voter registration systems and do better list maintenance.

Lisa Rab concludes:

The Republican narrative of massive voter fraud persists despite evidence from the party’s own crackdown—what election law expert Rick Hasen, a University of California-Irvine professor, calls “a whole lot of nothing.” For many conservatives, fears about voting by felons, who they say lean Democratic, and ACORN registration drives have simply been replaced with concerns about undocumented immigrants. (ACORN shut down in 2010 after conservative activist James O’Keefe posed as a pimp and filmed a misleading video of ACORN employees supposedly advising him and a prostitute on how to get a mortgage. O’Keefe later paid a $100,000 settlement to one employee whose name he had smeared.)

[…]

“Just because someone can fill out a registration form doesn’t meant they get on a [voter] list, doesn’t mean they cast a ballot, doesn’t meant the ballot is counted,” Becker says. “There’s a variety of checks in place … that would easily prevent widespread fraud.”

Studies conducted by academics and secretaries of state have found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare. There are small-scale examples, such as the Texas city councilwoman who was sentenced to five years in prison for registering noncitizens to vote during a 2006 primary. But Lorraine Minnite, a public policy professor at Rutgers, studied the Justice Department’s voter fraud crackdown during the Bush years and found that only 14 noncitizens were convicted of voting between 2002 and 2005.

But promoting the threat of voter fraud is a cottage industry, as I’ve said repreatedly:

Every couple of months, their agents (figuratively) fling smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell “voter fraud.” By the time the smoke clears and reporters realize there’s no fire — and no fraud — all viewers remember are hearing the words “voter fraud” over and over again, and the eye-popping crawlers on the news at six about dead people voting. Thus is spread an urban legend.

The voter fraud promotion industry conflates any and all kinds of election irregularities with in-person voter fraud to manufacture a significant problem where there is none, undermine confidence in elections (Vladimir Putin would approve), and build a constituency for photo ID and other election suppression laws that target minority voters with almost surgical precision. The Heritage Foundation maintains a database frequently referenced to support the need for state election “reforms.” But try finding in it actual cases of in-person fraud among 462 criminal cases of vote-buying, registration fraud, double voting, and election rigging by local officials dating back to 1990. In-person fraud is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of votes cast in each election.

Point this out and you might be accused of not valuing election integrity. That the potential exists that someone might vote improperly, the argument goes, demands greater vigilance and higher hurdles to participation. That so few people go to their polling places on Election Day to commit felonies is no counterargument to fraud believers. States allowing concealed and open carry of firearms means millions might breeze into banks and rob them, yet there is no concomitant push for heightened bank security. Nor calls for more barriers to widespread carrying of firearms. Because more regulations simply infringe honest Americans’ rights, and we can’t have that.

Mike Pence will have as much chance of finding those millions of elusive illegal voters as finding space aliens. As those paying attention recall, a clever study published in 2013 looked at how many people in America report having committed voter fraud. Researchers found that roughly the same percentages of the population admit to perpetrating voter fraud as admit to being abducted by aliens:

The implication here is that if one accepts that 2.5% is a valid lower bound for the prevalence of voter impersonation in the 2012 election then one must also accept that about 2.5% of the adult U.S. population — about 6 million people — believe that they were abducted by extra-terrestrials in the last year. If this were true then voter impersonation would be the least of our worries.

Since we know Trump gets some of his “intel” from Infowars conspiracist Alex Jones, perhaps reporters should ask whether Trump believes he has ever been abducted by aliens and if Alex Jones might be the better leader of the search for extra-legal voters.

Freistaat Trump?
by Tom Sullivan

It’s hard to go a week here in the “newly insane state of North Carolina”* without someone in elected office (as a patient in D.C. puts is) seeing somebody in court over something. Since the NCGOP took state government by the throat in 2013, that something has frequently involved matters Republicans euphemistically refer to as “election integrity,” known in less deranged climes as voter suppression.

With Democrat Roy Cooper in the governor’s mansion and Democrat Josh Stein as Cooper’s replacement as NC attorney general, power in Raleigh has shifted somewhat. How much will depend on what courts do with the legal messes left over from One-term Pat McCrory’s tenure.

Yesterday afternoon, Stein tweeted:

The right to vote is our most fundamental. Today, I moved to dismiss the pending petition to the U.S. Supreme Court on the 2013 voting law. pic.twitter.com/K7Rn4ginr3— Josh Stein (@JoshStein_) February 21, 2017

In his final days in office, McCrory had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the state’s appeal of the case it lost in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals last July. The point here is for the new Democratic electeds to pull the plug on the appeal of the Republican voter suppression law before a new Justice Gorsuch turns a 4-4 Supreme Court into a 5-4 conservative one. Withdrawing the appeal would allow the lower court ruling to stand. As Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog notes, Stein’s pointing out the potential for saving NC taxpayers up to $12 million in attorney’s fees for dropping the case is a nice touch. Plaintiffs included the League of Women Voters, individual plaintiffs, and the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.

Not so fast, say Republicans. A spokeswoman for Republican Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger claims Cooper and Stein cannot fire the attorneys for the state:

“Roy Cooper’s and Josh Stein’s desperate and politically motivated stunt to derail North Carolina’s voter ID law is not only illegal, it also raises serious questions about whether they’ve allowed their own personal and political prejudices and conflicts of interest to cloud their professional judgment,” Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore said in a joint statement.

Yes, they really do talk like that, and they legislate in similar tones.

From the Raleigh News and Observer:

Thomas Farr, a Raleigh attorney who has represented the lawmakers for several years in the elections law case, sent a letter to William McKinney, Cooper’s general counsel, arguing that neither the governor nor Stein have the authority to discharge him and others at his firm from the case and that he and others plan to continue in the case.

If the request by Cooper and Stein to withdraw the appeal is granted, the State Board of Elections, its individual members and its executive director will not immediately be withdrawn from the case. They would have to make similar requests.

And thanks to the legislative follies of the special session back in December, who controls the state Board of Elections is still in question. The Republican law restructuring the board has already been to the state Supreme Court. Judges issued an injunction pending a trial on March 7.

Rick Hasen writes, “I’ve gone into the morass before trying to figure out who can control NC litigation in these circumstances and I will have to leave this to NC law gurus.” Or maybe to the exorcists?

Some Republican lawmakers have offered amendments to the North Carolina Constitution that would remove a provision prohibiting the state’s secession …

Another amendment “focuses on language stating a citizen owes paramount allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and U.S. government. That proposal would eliminate the reference to the government.”

Perhaps the Tar Heel state could rebrand as Freistaat Trump? I hear South Carolina has a lightly used flag it doesn’t know what to do with.

(* trademark Charlie Pierce)

“that they should believe a lie”
by Tom Sullivan

Supporters told pollsters they liked Donald Trump for telling it like it is. Except that was never true. What Trump supporters like is he tells them what they want to hear. They don’t want the truth. He tells them lies. They don’t want facts. He feeds them disinformation. His administration dishes out propaganda, the kind Cold Warrior parents warned about.

Trump is a legend in his own mind. Even he doesn’t really believe it. He requires constant auto-reinforcement and adulation from those who surround him or he throws a Twitter tantrum. But that’s personal pathology. The societal one is more concerning. So is his party’s.

Two years ago, Heather Cox Richardson writing for Salon spoke about the Republican abandonment of truth for utility. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker attempted to write the search for truth out of the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement, replacing it with “meet the state’s workforce needs.” She traced the impulse back to William F. Buckley’s 1951 “God and Man at Yale” in which he proposed that The Enlightenment had led western civilization astray, in the mid-twentieth century, specifically, towards the New Deal.

Richardson wrote:

Rational argument supported by facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted, thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic individualism were absolute truths. Maintaining that faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition” than the Enlightenment had set out to replace, Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology.

By the ascent of George W. Bush to the presidency, Buckley’s view had won:

As Movement Conservatives took over the Republican Party, that ideology worked its way deep into our political system. It has given us, for example, a senator claiming words he spoke on the Senate floor were “not intended to be a factual statement.” It has given us “dynamic scoring,” a rule changing the way the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the economic impact of tax cuts, to reinforce the idea that cuts fuel economic growth despite the visibly disastrous effects of recent tax cuts on states such as Kansas. And it has given us attempts in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina and Colorado to discard the A.P. U.S. History framework and dictate that students learn instead the Movement Conservatives’ skewed version of the nation’s history. Politicians have always spun information to advance their own policies. The practice infuriates partisans but it reflects the Enlightenment idea of progress through reasoned argument. Movement Conservatives’ insistence on their own version of reality, in defiance of facts, is something different altogether.

Now Donald Trump is a president. A Republican president. With this walking bundle of pathologies, the descent into alternate reality returns and the slope is even steeper. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway insist we should accept the White House’s “alternative facts” over the evidence of our own eyes. And who, for instance, will ever forget the Bowling Green Massacre she fabricated?

What’s more confounding is how many Americans — Americans — buy into the kind of Soviet fantasy they once railed against.

Mikhail Iossel writes for The New Yorker that even Soviet citizens knew better than to believe the kind of propaganda Trump and his coterie spew daily. But in the name of making America great again, Trump’s supporters (the older ones, anyway) embrace what they once feared:

… Everyone knew that they, the Soviet people, lived in a veritable funhouse of a giant isolated world unto itself, in the parallel reality of that endless hall of crazily distorted mirrors. People were not fooled, to put it mildly. Still, there was nothing they, including myself and everyone I knew, could do with or about that understanding. There was no place for them to take it, to pour it out on. Being exposed to constant, relentless irradiation by that funhouse reality, forever aswim in a sea of lies, had made people lethargic and apathetic, cynical and fatalistic, dumbfounded into mute infantilism, drunkenness, and helpless rage in the meagreness of their tiny private, personal worlds.

Lethargic, cynical, fatalistic, etc. Hardly how Trump fanciers fancy themselves, but beware. Believe the lie, become the lie. What’s different is how amateur-hour similar propaganda efforts are here at home. No one is fooled.

“This American Life” took a skeptical look at the Trump travel ban over the weekend. They interviwed Benjamin Wittes, a national security expert from the Brookings Institution. Wittes wrote a scathing review of the Trump executive order, calling its purpose malevolent in addition to “the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.” Specifically, Wittes calls out the thinly veiled lie at the heart of it. Wittes writes:

What’s more, the document also takes steps that strike me as utterly orthogonal to any relevant security interest. If the purpose of the order is the one it describes, for example, I can think of no good reason to burden the lives of students individually suspected of nothing who are here lawfully and just happen to be temporarily overseas, or to detain tourists and refugees who were mid-flight when the order came down. I have trouble imagining any reason to raise questions about whether green card holders who have lived here for years can leave the country and then return. Yes, it’s temporary, and that may lessen the costs (or it may not, depending on the outcome of the policy review the order mandates), but temporarily irrational is still irrational.

Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.

When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.

Then you lie about why you’re really doing it, not because anyone will believe the lie, but because it’s company policy, as I once read about a meeting between a dissatisfied customer and a regional manager for GM:

“He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he lied anyway, not because he had anything to gain from the lies, but because it was company policy.”

And so it is with the Trump administration. I once believed the Bush II administration represented the apotheosis of Movement Conservative ideology, but I was wrong. Trump has discovered an even lower circle of hell.

The interview with Wittes brought me back to the voter fraud propaganda I referenced yesterday morning. Voter fraud is code speak the way Lee Atwater used “forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.” Promoters of voter ID laws and other voting restrictions don’t give a damn about election integrity. They’re not really concerned that masses of invisible people are voting illegally undetected. That’s the thinnest of window dressings. They’re angry that the “wrong kind” of people are voting at all. But believers in “telling it like it is” won’t admit to the lie.

Trump and those supporting his travel ban aren’t as afraid of terrorist violence as they are of foreign Others encroaching on their turf. Trump’s travel ban, like voter fraud, is another institutionalized lie. No one is fooled. Like the Soviets before them, they don’t even care if nobody is fooled. Lying is company policy.

Use your leverage? You bet they will
by Tom Sullivan

You wonder why Donald Trump doesn’t simply move on to the next lie. He has a boundless supply. But after being hammered for his tweets about the popular vote totals being compromised by millions of illegal votes, his team seems determined to dig in. Daily Beast reports:

President-elect Donald Trump doubled down on claims of voter fraud on Monday night, lashing out at journalists who dared to ask for some evidence. Addressing several journalists, Trump wrote, “There is NO QUESTION THAT voter fraud did take place, and in favor of Corrupt Hillary!” As for those who expressed doubt about Trump’s assertions, the president-elect told them to put up or shut up: “Pathetic – you have no sufficient evidence that Donald Trump did not suffer from voter fraud, shame! Bad reporter.”

That last one complaining the press has failed to prove a negative was Trump retweeting a 16 year-old from Beverly Hills. Actually, Trump didn’t use the retweet function. He simply copied and pasted the kid’s tweet.

@realDonaldTrump Good evening! Have been looking for examples of voter fraud. Please send our way. Full-time journalist here still working.— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) November 29, 2016

The New York Times editorial board figured, like many of us, that should Trump lose on Nov. 8 he would try to delegitimize the election by floating conspiracy theories from “right-wing propaganda sites like InfoWars.” Instead he’s trying to delegitimize his own victory. The Times writes:

In addition to insulting law-abiding voters everywhere, these lies about fraud threaten the foundations of American democracy. They have provided the justification for state voter-suppression laws around the country, and they could give the Trump administration a pretext to roll back voting rights on a national scale.

And why is Mr. Trump so hung up on the popular vote in the first place? After all, he won where it counts — in the Electoral College. And yet, in the three weeks since his victory, Mr. Trump has already admitted at least twice that he would prefer the presidency be determined by the popular vote, and not by 538 electors. It’s clear he feels threatened by Mrs. Clinton’s popular-vote lead — now more than 2.3 million and expected to exceed 2.5 million; as a percentage of the electorate, that is a wider margin than five presidents enjoyed. With support for third-party candidates added in, 54 percent of voters rejected Mr. Trump.

The right has been flogging the tiresome fraud meme for decades, insisting they are deeply concerned with election integrity when evidence exists that’s not their real motivation and evidence for massive fraud is absent.

Can we get back to something that’s a real threat to the country (in addition to Trump’s immaturity)? Say, how his business dealings worldwide leave him compromised as president when dealing with foreign powers? The Atlantic has a handy crib sheet on Trump’s global conflicts of interest:

The unprecedented nature of Trump’s business interests, coupled with the many precedents that Trump broke throughout his campaign—not releasing his tax returns, for example, which severely limits attempts to understand his financial situation—has provoked speculation that his presidency may bring about equally unprecedented opportunities for conflicts of interest. Trump’s response—provided on Twitter—only reinforces concerns that he will make little effort to avoid entangling his business and personal interests, and will instead attack those who point that out.

Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world.Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2016

The short-fingered vulgarian is insecure about the size of his win, the size of his, uh, hands, and the size of his net worth. “Use your leverage,” Trump advises in “The Art of the Deal.” Foreign powers? You bet they will.

Thanks for the tip, Mr. Minority.

“The Alinskey-esque tactics of the Democrats and their extremist ideology”

by digby

Raw Story on the latest RNC election suppression efforts:

Donald Trump’s repeated calls for his supporters to monitor polling places on Election Day are increasingly dangerous as various state Republican parties have echoed Trump’s proposal.

Earlier this month, the North Carolina Wake County Republican Party chair, Charles Hellwig sent out a letter to his community that read, “We are under assault by the Alinskey-esque tactics of the Democrats and their extremist ideology, which demands they take whatever action necessary to achieve their desired results.”

His letter was a call for supporters to sign up and volunteer on Election Day as “poll observers.” Hellwig’s is not the only call to action in what some are referring to as historically racist voter intimidation tactics.

On Friday, political analyst Jon Ralston shared on Twitter a similar call to action that was made by Nevada Grassroots.

The organization wrote in a post on their website that they were looking for “hard-working, professionals, who are interested in politics” and want to help shape this year’s election.

“We are currently hiring Election Representatives to assist with voting integrity,” the post continues. The position they are hiring for requires individuals to “stand watch” at polling places and the call was directed toward Republicans in particular.

In NV: “Do you care about Election Integrity? Now hiring Republicans to stand watch at the polls to ensure a fair election.” Here we go. pic.twitter.com/8ouLUVVmRp

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) October 28, 2016

Another organization linked to Trump recently released a script for “citizen journalists” to intimidate voters at polling places, as well.

The organization, called Vote Protectors offered resources to volunteers interested in monitoring polling places, including fake ID badges, and told their volunteers to film voters.

Such tactics of intimidation are incredibly dangerous, and target black voters and people of color heading to the polls, in particular.

Trump has made calls at his rallies for his supporters to “Go out,” and “watch your polling booths,” specifying, “Certain areas. I hear too many bad stories, and we can’t lose an election because of you know what I’m talking about.”

During a rally in Pennsylvania earlier this month, he told his supporters “We’re gonna watch Pennsylvania. Go down to certain areas and watch and study and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times.”

I don’t know if any of these yahoos will actually do anything. They are often just loudmouthed phonies who do a lot of prancing around. But you never know.

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