772 search results for ""voter fraud""

Run like a business
by Tom Sullivan

A quick refresher from Wikipedia:

A strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) is a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition. Such lawsuits have been made illegal in many jurisdictions on the grounds that they impede freedom of speech.

SLAPP suits are now illegal in twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia, but there is no federal prohibition. (We’ll get to that.) Several federal anti-SLAPP bills, like the latest, have never made it out of committee. Here are a few examples from Texas and more via the Ohio ACLU. Typically, the suits are brought by individuals, or by corporations against consumers.

In June, Murray Energy filed what looks for all the world like a SLAPP suit against HBO, Jon Oliver, Time Warner and the writers of Last Week Tonight for a segment satirizing the coal industry that mentioned Murray and its CEO by name. In what looks even more ironic this morning, the Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff wrote, “Parts of the complaint read like it had been written by President Donald Trump.”

And here we go (Associated Press):

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — An Oregon parent wanted details about school employees getting paid to stay home. A retired educator sought data about student performance in Louisiana. And college journalists in Kentucky requested documents about the investigations of employees accused of sexual misconduct.

Instead, they got something else: sued by the agencies they had asked for public records.

Government bodies are increasingly turning the tables on citizens who seek public records that might be embarrassing or legally sensitive. Instead of granting or denying their requests, a growing number of school districts, municipalities and state agencies have filed lawsuits against people making the requests — taxpayers, government watchdogs and journalists who must then pursue the records in court at their own expense.

The lawsuits generally ask judges to rule that the records being sought do not have to be divulged. They name the requesters as defendants but do not seek damage awards. Still, the recent trend has alarmed freedom-of-information advocates, who say it’s becoming a new way for governments to hide information, delay disclosure and intimidate critics.

Do you insist government be run like a business? Enjoy. Then again, if you are an authoritarian, you probably do.

ESPN is paying a really big price for its politics (and bad programming). People are dumping it in RECORD numbers. Apologize for untruth!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017

This is, again, authoritarian. Trump is using the power of the presidency to attack a private company because their employee criticized him. https://t.co/nYQBHcjFz9— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) September 15, 2017

So far Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has not sued the Kansas City Star over its FOIA requests for emails pertaining to his participation on the president’s voter fraud commission. His office simply asserts he is not bound by the new Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) because he is serving on the panel as a private citizen.

“Secretary Kobach’s personal emails concerning the Commission are therefore not subject to KORA, since he is not conducting public business on behalf of the State of Kansas while serving on the Commission,” said a spokesperson.

Max Kautsch, a Lawrence attorney who served on a state panel that helped draft the 2016 law, called the private citizen dodge, “obviously totally insane.”

And your point is?

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Wait, voting is like shooting people? What? 

by digby

I wrote about the latest voter “fraud” nonsense for Salon this morning:

It’s pretty much beyond dispute at this point that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election in a number of different ways. The extent of the damage, and whether or not the Trump campaign and other Republicans who were clearly the beneficiaries helped them do it, is still unknown. In the past it would have been automatic for the government to establish a blue-ribbon commission to investigate and make recommendations about how to prevent such events in the future. The 9/11 Commission comes to mind. That obviously is not happening now. In fact, the president is doing everything he can to prevent any investigations at all.

Never let it be said that Donald Trump isn’t concerned about the integrity of our elections, however. He is convinced that he was the victim of an unprecedented tidal wave of election fraud amounting to millions of illegal votes, all cast for his opponent in 2016. Determined to prove that he was cheated out of the popular vote, he immediately convened his Election Integrity Commission to look into the matter. It’s led by vote suppression zealot, Kansas Secretary of State and paid Breitbart columnist Kris Kobach, the man who wrote the template for Arizona’s odious “show me your papers” law that was struck down by the courts.

I’ve written about Kobach here on Salon for years. He is one of the foremost GOP experts on vote suppression and anti-immigration law. Those issues have long been central to conservative political strategy but have achieved new salience with demographic challenges to the Republican coalition, since that relies more and more upon a large racist and xenophobic faction at its base. Kobach is determined to ensure that both legal and illegal immigration is stopped and that voting is made as difficult as possible for minority groups and young people who tend to vote Democratic.

As analyst Ron Brownstein said on CNN on Tuesday when asked about the commission and the issue of “voter fraud”:

This is not a neutral “good government” argument. As the court said about the North Carolina [voter fraud] law, they talked about surgical precision aimed at minority voters. You have a diversifying country, and you have in Trump a candidate who relied on whites for 90 percent of his votes in that rapidly diversifying country. He’s looking at approval ratings among nonwhite voters of under 20 percent. So there is a clear kind of direction in the way this might be going in terms of the recommendations . . . that is about resisting the implications of a changing America.

On the same program, Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander explained the specific strategy behind Kobach’s commission:

As the chief election official in the state of Missouri that has a Republican supermajority, I have seen the GOP voter suppression playbook up close . . . The commission is step one. Convince the American people that American democracy doesn’t work so they can then take laws that make it harder to vote and spread them all over the country. And that is the core of the Trump reelection strategy.

Kobach got off to a bad start when he demanded that all states turn over all the personal information on their voters to the commission. He had to back off when many states, even those run by Republicans, refused. This looks even worse today than it did at the time, with Tuesday’s report that the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation demanded that the commission be stacked with right-wing extremists. That didn’t happen, but the president did appoint the man the foundation confirmed was the one who made that demand to the commission, Hans von Spakovsky. As the Campaign Legal Center has said, von Spakovsky is “widely considered to be the architect of the voter fraud myth.” One can only imagine what he and Kobach had planned to do with that information.

On Tuesday, Kobach held the second meeting of the commission and was once again embarrassed by his sloppy extremism. In a Breitbart column last week, he declared that voter fraud had tipped the election in New Hampshire last fall, costing the Republicans a Senate seat. The reason? There were people who registered to vote on Election Day with out-of-state drivers’ licenses and didn’t get a New Hampshire license within 60 days. As usual, the governing assumption was that these were mostly Democrats because Republicans are all honest as the day is long.

Dave Weigel of The Washington Post debunked this story at the time. These people were mostly college students, and there is no law that says your vote doesn’t count if you don’t change your driver’s license within 60 days. Nonetheless, Kobach and the commission hightailed it up to New Hampshire to “investigate,” where Kobach was confronted with his misleading assertions. He now says his evidence was “anecdotal” and admits he shouldn’t have said it “appears” there was fraud. He looked foolish, but didn’t admit he was wrong.

But that was nothing compared to the master trolling presentation by the thoroughly discredited economist John Lott, whose usual field is the study of gun violence on behalf of the NRA. Evidently, Lott wrote an article on voter fraud a decade ago from which to hang his alleged expert testimony, but his proposal was clearly designed simply to provoke Democrats. He suggested that if the left is so adamant about background checks for gun owners, the government should use that system to determine whether someone is eligible to vote. Quoting Senator Chuck Schumer, Lott said:

Democrats have long been concerned about voter suppression but they’ve also long lauded the background check system on guns, saying it’s simple, accurate, in “complete harmony with the right of people to go and defend themselves.” If they don’t believe that it suppresses people’s ability to defend themselves, would we believe that using this system would suppress being able to go and vote?

The sophomoric Republican commission members could barely keep from snickering and high-fiving each other over how they’d totally pwned those libs. It’ll be a cold day in hell before they try to pass gun control legislation again!

Oh, wait: This was about voter fraud. And they want to stop people from voting, don’t they? What are they talking about?

To recap: our election campaign was clearly tampered with by a foreign country. The president of the United States may or may not have been in on it, but he’s certainly been active in trying to cover it up. Meanwhile, he’s convened a commission that’s completely lacking in credibility to investigate election fraud that doesn’t exist, and they’re spending their time trolling Democrats about gun control.

It’s Breitbart’s world. We just live in it.

Trouble with a capital T
by Tom Sullivan

Still from The Music Man.

That rhymes with V. Guess what that stands for?

You’d think the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky would be in Iowa selling boys bands. But no. The godfather of the voter fraud myth was in New Hampshire yesterday as part of Kris Kobach’s crack Presidential Advisory Commission On Election Integrity selling voter ID. The commission’s true goal is, as Mother Jones reports, “focused on building up a narrative about widespread voter fraud—and potentially laying the groundwork to impose new restrictions on voting in order to combat it.”

This has been the holy grail for Republicans at least since since Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich publicly declared in 1980, “I don’t want everybody to vote,” adding “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Reducing that populace has probably been a goal since the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965.

Kobach brought the commission to New Hampshire to investigate alleged voter fraud. Alleged by him in a Breitbart News column last week. Kobach claimed that Democrat Maggie Hassan’s U.S. Senate seat was “stolen through voter fraud” last fall. See (Aha!), of the 6,540 same-day registrants who voted using out-of-state driver’s licenses for ID, only 1,014 had filed for a New Hampshire license 10 months later. The fact that the bulk were college students voting where they attend school, as provided by law, went unmentioned. The only college Kobach is interested in is the electoral college.

Lobbing fraud smoke bombs has a long tradition. By the time the smoke clears and we discover once again there was never a fire, all the public remembers is they saw smoke and heard someone yelling, “Fire!” It’s all about the publicity.

Von Spakovsky was there to present evidence in the form of a Heritage Foundation database of voter fraud assembled from cases of election irregularities of any variety going back decades. The bulk involve absentee ballot fraud, but they pad out the case for erecting barriers to people voting in person, which of course is the point. Heritage earlier in the year urged the administration to keep Democrats and mainstream Republicans off the panel.

Former Secretary of State Jason Kander told CNN:

“I have seen the GOP voter suppression playbook up close,” Kander explained. “It has three steps. Step one, undermine faith in democracy. Step two, create obstacles to voting. Step three, create obstacles to the obstacles.”

“The commission is step one, it is convincing the American people that American democracy doesn’t work, so that they can then take laws that make it harder to vote and spread them all around the country,” Kander predicted. “It’s the core of Trump’s re-election strategy.”

Promoters of the erecting higher barriers to voting argue that people don’t vote because the system is rigged. Polls say otherwise, says University of New Hampshire political scientist Andrew Smith:

“The major reason that they see that people don’t vote … is that they just didn’t bother, they weren’t interested, they forgot,” Smith said. “Basically, issues of convenience and noninterest were the major reasons.”

Still, several members of the commission — including Kobach — have argued that voter fraud is a serious problem that undermines public confidence.

Except undermining public confidence to build support for erecting voting barriers is Kobach’s goal (von Spakovsky’s as well). Providing rubes with a solution to a problem they didn’t know they had before the traveling salesman conjured it was Harold Hill’s business model, as it has been Spakovsky’s for decades.

This is where Kander is mistaken. The commission isn’t step one. It’s the eleventy-leventh edition of step one.

The Brennan Center for Justice maintains an archive of documents relating to GOP attempts to suppress minority voting that dates back to 1982:

DNC v. RNC Consent Decree

November 5, 2016

In 1982, after caging in predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods, the Republican National Committee and New Jersey Republican State Committee entered into a consent decree with their Democratic party counterparts. Under that decree and its 1987 successor, the Republican party organizations agreed to allow a federal court to review proposed “ballot security” programs, including any proposed voter caging.

The consent decree has been invoked several times, by the parties to the decree and by others. In late 2008, the Democratic National Committee and Obama for America sought to enforce the consent decree, claiming that the RNC had not submitted alleged ballot security operations for review. After the election, the RNC asked the federal court to vacate or substantially modify the decree. The court denied the RNC’s motion to vacate the consent decree and ordered the decree remain in effect until December 2017. The RNC then appealed to the Third Circuit, which unanimously rejected the appeal and affirmed the District Court’s decision. A subsequent petition for rehearing en banc by the full Third Circuit, and a certiorari petition to U.S. Supreme Court, were denied.

On October 26, 2016, the DNC filed a motion asking that the court find the RNC had violated the decree. On November 5, after abbreviated discovery, the district court denied the DNC’s request, ruling that the DNC had not provided sufficient evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and the RNC on ballot-security operations, but will allow the DNC to offer further evidence after the election.

The reason the GOP’s “voter fraud” promotion didn’t enjoy more press earlier is because in the 1980s conservatives did not have Fox News, talk radio, and social media to promote it. But the fraud fraud is nothing new. Suppressing the vote has been a GOP project for decades.

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Focused like a laser
by Tom Sullivan

Jonathan Chait observes certain parallels one can draw between Republicans and Democrats. While those can be sufficient to uphold the media’s commitment to both-siderism, the similarities are superficial, he argues. Commenting on a Vox essay by political scientist Lee Drutman that looks at the threat posed by increasing political tribalism, Chait writes:

It is certainly true that the psychological relationship between the parties has a certain symmetry. Both fear each other will cheat to win and use their power to stack the voting deck. “If Republicans win in close elections, Democrats say it’s only because they cheated by making it harder for Democratic constituencies to vote; if Democrats win in close elections, Republicans say it’s only because they voted illegally.” But while it is not true that Democrats have allowed illegal voting in nontrivial levels, it is extremely true that Republicans have deliberately made voting inconvenient for Democratic-leaning constituencies. The psychology is parallel, but the underlying facts are not.

The same extends to other beliefs vs. behaviors. For the left, one could argue, that is because of the structures the right has in place for advancing an agenda. The conservative media and its think tanks, to name two. Rush Limbaugh may boast he’s working with half his brain tied behind his back, but he has the advantage of not being constrained by a regard for the truth. The left tries to please a media still “open to contrary facts,” Chait writes, while right-wing media pushes a consistent narrative heedless of them:

In the meantime, whatever the very real flaws in the American political and electoral system, it is simply impossible to design any kind of a system that can withstand a stress test like a major party captured by a faction as radical as the conservative movement. Its absence of limiting principles to its ideology, indifference to empirical evidence, and inability to concede failings of its dogma lead to an endless succession of failures explained away to the base as faintheartedness.

The doom loop Drutman describes is, in reality, both sides responding to the phenomenon of Republican extremism. Republicans are sealed off in a bubble of paranoia and rage, and Democrats are sealed off from that bubble. Democrats fear Republican government because it is dangerous and extreme. Republicans fear Democratic government because they are dangerous and extreme.

The conservative movement has convinced itself and quite a large swath of supporters that the real problem in this country is people less well-off than themselves. When foreign Others wane as potent bogeymen, the poor are the go-to stand-ins. Even as many struggling not to fall out of the middle class believe the president speaks for them, he and his party will be laser-focused on worsening their lot and keeping them from voting if they do. The Constitution may guarantee protections for anyone born or naturalized, but some wielding power think there ought to be a club fee to keep out the riffraff, i.e., the rest of us.

Catherine Rampell provides yet another example for the Washington Post. Republicans are promoting “an innovative way to punish the poor and simultaneously increase budget deficits.” She writes:

To pull off this impressive twofer, they would put every American applying for the earned-income tax credit (EITC) through a sort of mini-audit before getting their refund. This would both place huge new burdens on the working poor and divert scarce Internal Revenue Service resources away from other audit targets, such as big corporations, that offer a much higher return on investment.

Business-minded conservatives, one would think, would legislate with an eye for the country’s bottom line. It’s just that their political bottom line comes first. The ostensible purpose is to target waste, fraud, and abuse, the free energy device of conservative economics and source of unlimited budgetary savings for offsetting the one percent’s tax cuts. The result of auditing EITC applicants will be additional delays and hurdles for the working poor.

Recall that Republicans have been steadily cutting the IRS’s budget, which is a silly thing to do if you’re truly a fiscal conservative who believes in “law and order.” The IRS brings in far more money than it receives, particularly in its work going after tax cheats.

And cutting the IRS budget is an especially silly thing to do if you’re also giving the agency an enormous new mandate likely to crowd out other enforcement activities — including those that bring in much bigger paydays.

But as with the voter fraud snipe hunt, eliminating the impact of the the miniscule amount of cheating is not the point. Nor is the country’s bottom line.

All the while the message from the right’s Mighty Wurlizer to the base will be that “those people,” the lesser-thans, are the real targets, not them. Even as their paychecks buy less and tax cuts help less, the base will believe.

Conveniently, the GOP will have help in furthering that notion from outside its think tanks and media outlets. The Daily Beast reveals that not only did Russia promote fake news on Facebook to aid Republicans’ 2016 efforts, it promoted events as well:

The Facebook events—one of which echoed Islamophobic conspiracy theories pushed by pro-Trump media outlets—are the first indication that the Kremlin’s attempts to shape America’s political discourse moved beyond fake news and led unwitting Americans into specific real-life action.

“This is the next step,” Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and expert on Russia’s influence campaign, told The Daily Beast. “The objective of influence is to create behavior change. The simplest behavior is to have someone disseminate propaganda that Russia created and seeded. The second part of behavior influence is when you can get people to physically do something.”

In the days pre-Facebook, I collected right-wing, “pass it on” emails from around the Net and wondered if, rather than just enthusiastic wingnuts, there wasn’t a think tank somewhere churning them out and circulating them to conservative email lists. I wonder now has anyone looked at whether the shop might have been in Russia?

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Why are we being polite?
by Tom Sullivan

When does America start calling bullshit on bullshitters? Yes, it’s impolite, but aren’t we beyond polite at this point? How long do we the people let shysters and mountebanks game the courts, the press, and the legislative process the way they game elections?

Herewith some further thoughts on the court ruling on voter ID this week in Texas, and the NCGOP redistricting foot-dragging in North Carolina, and the Richard Spencer interview mentioned on Tuesday.

HOW STUPID DO YOU THINK WE ARE?

In issuing her ruling Wednesday, United States District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos came as close to writing that as we’ve seen in some time. The Texas voter ID law is irredeemable, she wrote. It is discriminatory not just in effect, but in intent. No number of cosmetic tweaks can change that (emphasis added):

First, the Court’s finding of discriminatory intent strongly favors a wholesale injunction against the enforcement of any vestige of the voter photo ID law. Second, the lack of evidence of in-person voter impersonation fraud in Texas belies any urgency for an independently-fashioned remedy from this Court at this time. There is no apparent harm in the delay attendant to allowing the Texas legislature to go through its ordinary processes to address the issues in due legislative course. Third, making informed choices regarding the expansion of the types of IDs or the nature of any DRI would require additional fact-findings on issues not currently before the Court. These matters, regarding reliable accuracy in photo ID systems, are better left to the legislature.

Consequently, the only appropriate remedy for SB 14’s discriminatory purpose or discriminatory result is an injunction against enforcement of that law and SB 5, which perpetuates SB 14’s discriminatory features. With respect to the VRA § 2 discriminatory purpose finding, elimination of SB 14 “root and branch” is required, as the law has no legitimacy.

Thank you. That’s about as close as a federal judge comes to telling politicians they are full of it.

Except perhaps the March 2012 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd District:

During the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race, the Democratic National Committee and the New Jersey Democratic State Committee filed suit against the Republican National Committee and New Jersey Republican State Committee for alleged intimidation of minority voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The RNC allegedly created voter caging lists in minority precincts and, allegedly, hired off-duty law enforcement officers to stand outside minority precincts wearing “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands, some bearing firearms. The settlement the RNC signed with the DNC — applicable nationwide — limited the RNC, its agents’ and employees’ ability to engage in voter fraud prevention efforts without prior court approval. There were successful enforcement actions against the RNC in 1987 in Louisiana and in 1990 in North Carolina. Wikipedia has a list of references to alleged RNC voter suppression actions that never made it to court.

In 2008, the RNC sued to have the 1982 Consent Decree voided, only to lose in New Jersey district court and in the U.S. Court of Appeals.

As in the Texas case, the RNC made a number of (if I may say so) disingenuous arguments for why the agreement should be voided, including citing the race of the President, his Attorney General, and the by-then former chair of the RNC, and cited the increase in black voter turnout as proof “minority voters are not being suppressed,” none of which addressed past behavior enjoined by the decree. The RNC’s lawyers complained that the decree prevented them from mounting legitimate voter protection efforts. Judge Joseph Greenaway reminded the RNC’s attorneys that modifications to the original decree had already addressed their complaints and they were free to do just that. Furthermore (emphasis added):

The District Court rejected the RNC’s argument that the Decree must be vacated or modified because the risk of voter fraud outweighs the risk of voter suppression and intimidation. As the District Court correctly points out, the Decree only requires preclearance for programs involving the prevention of in-person voter fraud. Furthermore, the District Court has never prevented the RNC from implementing a voter fraud prevention program that the RNC has submitted for preclearance, at least in part, because the RNC has never submitted any voter fraud prevention program for preclearance.

Greenaway must have smiled at writing that, but he wasn’t done:

Additionally, the District Court did not abuse its discretion by finding that the RNC had not produced evidence demonstrating a lack of incentive for the RNC to engage in voter suppression and intimidation. The racial and ethnic background of this nation’s political leadership, the RNC’s leadership, and the electorate do not decrease the likelihood that the RNC will suppress minority voters such that prospective application of the Decree is inequitable. If the RNC does not hope to engage in conduct that would violate the Decree, it is puzzling that the RNC is pursuing vacatur so vigorously notwithstanding the District Court’s significant modifications to the Decree.

Now get the hell out of my courtroom, federal judges are too polite to say. Decorum and all that. The longstanding consent decree is set to expire this December. Would that the courts had more like Ramos and Greenaway.

In GOP legislators passing vote suppressing laws, in gerrymandering districts “with surgical precision,” in pursuing the sham of widespread voter fraud, and in blowing racial dog whistles as loud as foghorns, what is infuriating is how readily their peers, legislators, and the rest of us play along politely with the sham that they are not up to exactly what we know they are up to.

Perhaps Greenaway remembered his Harry Frankfurt:

The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he
misrepresents what he is up to.

Personal responsibility for that lies with the bullshitter. How the rest of us respond is on us. After the litany of vote suppression measures nominally aimed at preventing voter fraud, after the growing list of expired rationale given for passing voter ID bills, after the insincere efforts at complying with court-ordered redrawing of racially gerrymandered districts, and after the bald-faced way agents of the right look America in the eye and misrepresent their intentions (which the federal court in Texas found this week), how long will we abet them by treating them seriously? We are not talking about political spin, but outright dishonesty. We are seeing in Texas and in North Carolina — Ramos cites North Carolina in her ruling — is abuse of the courts to rope-a-dope political opponents in a strategic attempt to run out legislative and electoral clocks, bankrupt adversaries, and delay, delay, delay.

Thankfully, as Rick Hasen observes, the other shoe has yet to drop in the Texas case. He writes, “[A] finding of intentional discrimination can be the basis, under section 3c of the Voting Rights Act, to put Texas back under the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act for up to 10 years, at the court’s discretion. The court has scheduled further briefing on the section 3c issue for the end of the month.” Perhaps a court whose patience has run out will finally call Texas Republicans to account. Recidivists being recidivists, they will immediately look for other avenues for gaming elections and suppressing political adversaries. But notice will have been given not only to them but to North Carolina as well. Whether the current Justice Department will do its job is another rant for another day.

There are laws against frivolous lawsuits and malicious prosecution. Yet none of which I am aware that enjoin or penalize politicians who repeatedly pass malicious legislation to harm those who would not vote with them or to “exact revenge” upon rivals in order to expand their own powers.

To call it that, or to call out such women and men out for it is thought the height of vile partisanship. The press will not do it. The courts, only in a courtly manner. So we go through the motions of treating bullshit as statesmanship, then wonder why America holds both major parties and Congress in contempt. We demand plain, unfiltered talk without demanding what is unfiltered is also true and not subterfuge. Honesty from the Republican camp these days comes as likely as not in the form of Kinsley gaffes.

Be they statesmen or polarizing personalities such as Richard Spencer, practitioners of bullshit react to those who challenge them with feigned hurt. Moi? In Coulteresque fashion, they figuratively (if not literally) toss their hair, rolls their eyes and sigh. The fault is ours in having misunderstood what they plainly said and plainly meant. How dare we question their motives, which are only honorable. As honorable as the men depicted in statuary erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in support of Jim Crow.

So are they all, all honorable men.

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“Our country had changed.” Uh-huh.
by Tom Sullivan

Some of us really believe in government of, by, and for the people. In democracies, that means we believe in the people choosing their own leaders through the democratic process. Some of us believe in that strongly enough to walk away from our paying jobs from September to early November in even-numbered years to help that process along, to ensure it is administered fairly, and to defend our neighbors’ right to vote. Some of our political opponents don’t see it that way.

Take Texas, just to pick a state at random. Texas has had three of its voting laws struck down for discriminating against minority voters in the last ten days, Ari Berman writes in Mother Jones:

On August 15, a three-judge federal court in San Antonio ruled that Texas’ 2013 congressional redistricting maps were enacted with “racially discriminatory intent” against Latino and African American voters.

On August 17, the Fifth District Court of Appeals ruled that Texas’ restrictions on assistance to non-English-speaking voters violated the Voting Rights Act.

On August 23, a federal district court in Corpus Christi ruled that Texas’ voter ID law, amended by the state legislature in 2017, had a “discriminatory purpose” against minority voters.

Berman notes that Wednesday’s decision striking down S.B. 5 is the eighth finding of intentional discrimination against Texas since 2011. Atlantic’s Vann R. Newkirk adds that S.B. 5 is the fifth iteration of the Texas voter ID law struck down in federal court for having discriminatory intent:

Perhaps hoping that the sixth time will be the charm, Texas legislators who wrote S.B. 14 and S.B. 5 do seem likely to appeal their case. What’s at stake is suddenly greater than their ability to implement voter ID requirements. In her ruling Wednesday, Ramos stated that one possible remedy the court could consider could be “continued supervision of Texas election laws under the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act.” That is, the court could force Texas to go back to the requirement of having all of its elections laws cleared by the Department of Justice, a requirement implemented by the Voting Rights Act on all former strongholds of Jim Crow, and one effectively stripped away by the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision.

Josh Marshall adds, “Section 3, allows for states to be put under pre-clearance if they are found to have passed voting laws with a discriminatory intent.”

Shelby County v. Holder was the Supreme Court decision in which Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in striking down the preclearance provision in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, “Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”Preclearance was no longer needed. But the ruling left Section 3 in place.

Roberts got it wrong. Congress passed no remedy to address “current conditions.” The Voting Rights Act may have changed our country’s voting laws, but Texas didn’t change.

Nor did North Carolina, just to pick at random another state with a Republican-controlled legislature from the eastern fringe of the old Confederacy. North Carolina’s voter ID law also got slapped down in the federal courts for being racially discriminatory. As in Texas, that doesn’t mean the GOP legislators behind it won’t try again and seek other means to game elections.

After federal courts threw out Republican-drawn federal and state redistricting maps as racial gerrymanders, and after getting strongly criticized in public comments this week, legislators in Raleigh argued last night over new legislative districts redrawn by court mandate. As in Texas, the changes were cosmetic.

Wendy Weiser and Daniel Weiner of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law write about legislative moves North Carolina Republicans made last December to prevent Roy Cooper, the newly elected Democratic governor, from appointing members to the State Board of Elections:

Seventeen days before Cooper was to take office, the Republican-dominated legislature passed a package of sweeping changes designed to limit his authority, which the outgoing Republican governor signed into law. The centerpiece of this effort was a plan to ensure continued Republican dominance of powerful state and county boards of elections, which are responsible for running elections in the state and have been controlled by appointees from the Governor’s party for more than a century. (The original law was struck down by a state court in March but then reenacted over Cooper’s veto with only minor changes.)

The new law extends the tenure — indefinitely, for all intents and purposes — of the sitting Republican-appointed Executive Director of the State Board of Elections, North Carolina’s leading election official. She would otherwise have been supplanted by a new Democratic appointee. The law also awards half the seats on state and local election boards to Republicans, which allows them to block any changes to voting rules adopted by the previous Republican-controlled bodies. The law even says Republicans get to chair all election boards during every crucial election year when the President, Governor and all statewide officials are on the ballot.

These changes leave little doubt as to who would really be in charge of North Carolina’s election process — and that is the point. Some legislative leaders openly admitted that one of their main goals of the election board law was to keep Republicans in power.

North Carolina began seeing county-level fallout from these moves this week. For decades, custom has been for the chief of three judges in each precinct to be from the party of the governor. In my county this week (as well as in others, I hear), the county Board of Elections proposed splitting the precinct chief judges between the parties, mirroring the even split described above for state and county boards.

Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State overseer of the president’s voter fraud commission, oversaw “a Kansas election system that threw out at least three times as many ballots as any similarly sized state did,” according to AP:

Only six states ” all among the top 10 in population ” discarded more votes during the 2016 election than the 33rd-largest state of Kansas, according to data collected by the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that certifies voting systems. Kansas’ 13,717 rejected ballots even topped the 13,461 from Florida, which has about seven times as many residents.

Critics of Kansas’ election system argue its unusually high number of discarded ballots reflects policies shaped over several elections that have resulted in many legitimate voters being kept off voter rolls in an effort to crack down on a few illegitimate ones.

Kobach knew in advance of last November of a problem with Kansans being notified online they were properly registered when they were not. His elections staff failed to notify the public. The exact number who had their votes thrown out is “unclear.” So is the fate of your democracy.

Your name doesn’t have to be Rorschach to see a pattern here. What does Chief Justice Roberts see today?

Russell Walker filed a lawsuit in York SC, demanding confederate flags be returned to the main courtroom @SpecNewsCLT pic.twitter.com/MVDYSEBIEe— Yoojin Cho (@Yoojin_Cho) August 24, 2017

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

The fight continues
by Tom Sullivan

Confederate memorial statue, Statesboro, Georgia, U.S. Photo by Jud McCranie via Creative Commons.

A small “free speech” rally scheduled for Boston Common yesterday by men wearing Trump hats and flags drowned in a sea of as many as 40,000 peaceful counterprotesters:

As the crowd grew, Superintendent in Chief Willie Gross of the Boston Police Department worked the crowd. He thanked marcher after marcher, individually, for coming out to make their voices heard. He complimented people on their creative signs. He took dozens of pictures with marchers who looked relieved to discover that the police weren’t there to give them a hard time.

“This is how we do it in Boston,” he said. “We exercise our right to free speech, but we do it peacefully. If anyone starts anything [at the Common] we’ll get them right out.”

The guy who starts talking halfway through this video gets America so much better than our president. https://t.co/xHcIKDVFtn— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) August 20, 2017

But white nationalism and Confederate statuary at the center of the violence last week in Charlottesville are distractions. The Washington Post Editorial Board this morning cautions that voter suppression is this era’s civil rights issue:

Yet even if all 1,500 Confederate symbols across the country were removed overnight by some sudden supernatural force, the pernicious crusade to roll back voting rights would continue apace, with voters of color suffering its effects disproportionately. Pushing back hard against those who would purge voter rolls, demand forms of voter ID that many Americans don’t possess, and limit times and venues for voting — this should be a paramount cause for the Trump era.

In statehouse after statehouse where Republicans hold majorities, the playbook is well established, and the tactics are becoming increasingly aggressive.

Coming in for well-deserved criticism is of course the president’s voter fraud commission led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, described as “the nation’s most determined, litigious and resourceful champion of voter suppression.” A close second might be Republicans in control of North Carolina’s statehouse.

After 50 weeks of foot-dragging in redrawing 28 state House and Senate districts ruled racial gerrymanders, and after asking for an additional three and a half months, three federal judges in Greensboro took Republican leaders to task on July 27.

“You don’t seem serious, so what’s our assurance that you are serious about remedying this?” asked District Judge Catherine Eagles. The judges gave Republican legislators in charge of the redraw a September 1 date for approval of new maps. They presented the new House map on Saturday. Release of the Senate map is expected today. Supporting data will follow on Monday, officials say. The machinations echo with history.

Ryan Cooper writes for The Week how briefly freed slaves enjoyed voting rights after the Civil War:

After the war came Reconstruction. Disgruntled ex-Confederates, assisted by the deeply racist President Andrew Johnson, attempted to return their states to a condition as close to slavery as possible — in essence overturning the result of the war (in which some 200,000 black Union soldiers had constituted one key to victory) through terrorism. Enraged Radical Republicans, with the strong support of President Ulysses S. Grant after he was elected, occupied the South with federal troops and enforced protection of black suffrage. From 1867-1876, while ex-slaves did not get meaningful economic help, their voting rights were protected.

But a financial crisis and a return of racist Democrats to power ended Reconstruction and ushered in the myth of The Lost Cause. The South’s effort to rewrite its history succeeded, and the Jim Crow of racial oppression continued until the 1960s. The Civil Rights era merely drove white supremacist culture underground. Cooper concludes:

If the federal government had beaten ex-Confederate terrorists into submission for as long as it took — particularly in the crucial two years after the war, when Johnson’s stubborn racism allowed them to regroup and regain some initiative, we would not be having this crisis. Instead tyranny displaced democracy in the American South, white Americans swallowed a lot of comforting lies to cover up that fact, and open racism continued to thrive — only partly beaten back by the civil rights advances of the 1960s. Violent white supremacy lives today, as does political racism from conservative Southern politicians, who are to this day working feverishly to disenfranchise as many black Americans as possible, because of that moral failure.

Let us remember this the next time some conservative argues, as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts did when he gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, that measures to protect American democracy from racist tyranny are “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.” White terror today grows up the frame of a historical trellis well over 150 years old. Perhaps someday America’s history of racism can truly be buried. But first, it must be killed.

Like kudzu, another southern bane, efforts to keep power in the right hands, white hands, are harder to eradicate for not having been yanked up by the roots a century and a half ago.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Well, this is comforting

by digby

About a quarter of the American people are members of a cult:

Critics of President Trump have repeatedly warned of his potential to undermine American democracy. Among the concerns are his repeated assertions that he would have won the popular vote had 3 to 5 million “illegals” not voted in the 2016 election, a claim echoed by the head of a White House advisory committee on voter fraud.

Claims of large-scale voter fraud are nottrue, but that has not stopped a substantial number of Republicans from believing them. But how far would Republicans be willing to follow the president to stop what they perceive as rampant fraud? Our recent survey suggests that the answer is quite far: About half of Republicans say they would support postponing the 2020 presidential election until the country can fix this problem.

Here’s how we did our research:

The survey interviewed a sample of 1,325 Americans from June 5 through 20. Respondents were recruited from the Qualtrics online panel who had previously reported identifying with or leaning toward one of the two major parties. We focus on the 650 respondents who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. The sample has been weighted to match the population in terms of sex, age, race and education.

After a series of initial questions, respondents were asked whether Trump won the popular vote, whether millions of illegal immigrants voted, and how often voter fraud occurs. These questions evoke arguments frequently made by Trump and others about the integrity of the 2016 election.

Then the survey asked two questions about postponing the 2020 election. 

If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote, would you support or oppose postponing the election?
What if both Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote? Would you support or oppose postponing the election?

Roughly half of Republicans believe Trump won the popular vote — and would support postponing the 2020 election.

Nearly half of Republicans (47 percent) believe that Trump won the popular vote, which is similar to this finding. Larger fractions believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted (68 percent) and that voter fraud happens somewhat or very often (73 percent). Again, this is similar to previous polls.

Moreover, 52 percent said that they would support postponing the 2020 election, and 56 percent said they would do so if both Trump and Republicans in Congress were behind this.

Not surprisingly, beliefs about the 2016 election and voter fraud were correlated with support for postponement. People who believed that Trump won the popular vote, that there were millions of illegal votes in 2016, or that voter fraud is not rare were more likely to support postponing the election. This support was also more prevalent among Republicans who were younger, were less educated, had less factual knowledge of politics and strongly identified with the party.

Trump’s one true belief

by digby

This piece by Carol Anderson in the New York Times about the policies of racism is really important, particularly in light of what the Trump administration is trying to accomplish:

White resentment put Donald Trump in the White House. And there is every indication that it will keep him there, especially as he continues to transform that seething, irrational fear about an increasingly diverse America into policies that feed his supporters’ worst racial anxieties.

If there is one consistent thread through Mr. Trump’s political career, it is his overt connection to white resentment and white nationalism. Mr. Trump’s fixation on Barack Obama’s birth certificate gave him the white nationalist street cred that no other Republican candidate could match, and that credibility has sustained him in office — no amount of scandal or evidence of incompetence will undermine his followers’ belief that he, and he alone, could Make America White Again.

The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.

Like on Christmas morning, every day brings his supporters presents: travel bans against Muslims, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Hispanic communities and brutal, family-gutting deportations, a crackdown on sanctuary cities, an Election Integrity Commission stacked with notorious vote suppressors, announcements of a ban on transgender personnel in the military, approval of police brutality against “thugs,” a denial of citizenship to immigrants who serve in the armed forces and a renewed war on drugs that, if it is anything like the last one, will single out African-Americans and Latinos although they are not the primary drug users in this country. Last week, Mr. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions put the latest package under the tree: a staffing call for a case on reverse discrimination in college admissions, likely the first step in a federal assault on affirmative action and a determination to hunt for colleges and universities that discriminate against white applicants.

That so many of these policies are based on perception and lies rather than reality is nothing new. White resentment has long thrived on the fantasy of being under siege and having to fight back, as the mass lynchings and destruction of thriving, politically active black communities in Colfax, La. (1873), Wilmington, N.C. (1898), Ocoee, Fla. (1920), and Tulsa, Okla. (1921), attest. White resentment needs the boogeyman of job-taking, maiden-ravaging, tax-evading, criminally inclined others to justify the policies that thwart the upward mobility and success of people of color.

The last half-century hasn’t changed that. The war on drugs, for example, branded African-Americans and Latinos as felons, which stripped them of voting rights and access to housing and education just when the civil rights movement had pushed open the doors to those opportunities in the United States.

Similarly, the intensified war on immigrants comes, not coincidentally, at the moment when Latinos have gained visible political power, asserted their place in American society and achieved greater access to schools and colleges. The ICE raids have terrorized these communities, led to attendance drop-offs in schools and silenced many from even seeking their legal rights when abused.

The so-called Election Integrity Commission falls in the same category. It is a direct response to the election of Mr. Obama as president. Despite the howls from Mr. Trump and the Republicans, there was no widespread voter fraud then or now. Instead, what happened was that millions of new voters, overwhelmingly African-American, Hispanic and Asian, cast the ballots that put a black man in the White House. The punishment for participating in democracy has been a rash of voter ID laws, the purging of names from the voter rolls, redrawn district boundaries and closed and moved polling places.

There’s more. It’s not pretty.

The good news is that racism is dead. It’s such a relief.

Local agit-prop for fun and profit

by digby

I’ve written about Sinclair Broadcasting many times. But this look at the latest from Media Matters shows it’s starting to get very, very weird:

Local television news giant Sinclair Broadcast Group has been making headlines in recent weeks as it seeks to both double down on its requirement that its stations run mandated conservative commentary segments and vastly expand its reach into new major cities across the United States.

Plenty of recent major profiles of Sinclair have discussed its unusual tactic of designating certain conservative commentary segments it produces in its national studios as “must-runs,” meaning that every Sinclair-owned local television news station — all 73, across 33 states and the District of Columbia — is required to air them. The Sinclair brand has been openly right-wing for decades, causing controversy when executives similarly mandated the airing of an anti-John Kerry documentary and chose not to run a Nightline episode they viewed as critical of George W. Bush in the early 2000s.

The latest Sinclair profiles often focus on the “Bottom Line with Boris” segments starring former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn, who is now employed as Sinclair’s chief political analyst. Epshteyn has been producing 60- to 90-second commentary segments several times a week since Sinclair hired him in April. Last month, Sinclair announced it would be upping Epshteyn’s segments from airing three times per week to nine.

Employees at Sinclair stations across the country, from Seattle, WA, to Washington, D.C., are expressing concerns about the clearly conservative must-run segments pushed by Sinclair executives.

Anchors at individual local news stations owned by Sinclair are seemingly not required to introduce the segments in any particular way before running them; in fact, employees at at least one station have said they try to run the segments along with commercials “so they blend in with paid spots.” The on-air segments themselves have no built-in disclosure that Epshteyn was until recently employed by the same White House he now regularly lavishes with on-air praise (online versions of his commentary note his White House connection). Viewers also might not know that Sinclair’s efforts to expand to new cities across the country and corner the markets in mid-sized cities in battleground states are possible only because of the deregulatory efforts of the administration Epshteyn loves so dearly.

Sinclair is empowering Epshteyn to broadcast regular segments effusively praising his former employer to local TV news viewers across the country who aren’t signing up to watch garbled propaganda every evening. His segments often seem to lazily tow the administration’s line on a given news story, when they bother to address a story at all — sometimes his segments are glaringly focused on subjects that have nothing to do with whatever embarrassing headlines Trump is making that day.

There are a few key examples of Epshteyn’s propaganda you may have already seen, like the video from June in which he mirrored the Trump administration’s war on the press by declaring the White House press briefing “a circus and a distraction,” or last weekend’s jaw-droppingly ill-timed defense of 10-day White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.

But these aren’t isolated examples. Here are five other “Bottom Line with Boris” segments that your aunt in Cedar Rapids may have unwittingly watched. Judge for yourself…

CNN is biased against Trump!

In Epshteyn’s June 28 “Bottom Line with Boris” segment, he focused on echoing Trump’s talking points casting CNN as biased and pushing a highly misleading (and embarrassing) video of a CNN medicalproducer discussing the network’s political coverage from right-wing video artist James O’Keefe.

Epshteyn concluded that CNN was “struggling” to report on the facts writ large:

It’s also important to further focus on CNN’s digital presence. The network’s website is supposed to be delivering news. However, it is dominated by opinion-based headlines and articles with more commentary than impartial fact. The bottom line is this: CNN, along with other cable news networks, is struggling to stick to the facts and to be impartial in covering politics in general and this president specifically.
States should cooperate with Trump’s “voter fraud” commission!

In Epshteyn’s July 5 “Bottom Line with Boris” segment, he encouraged states to cooperate with the Trump administration’s bogus voter fraud commission, which experts have said could actually be used to suppress legal votes.

Epshteyn concluded:

The extent of voter fraud in our elections has been hotly debated between the left and the right. The president’s commission has been established to come up with a factual, impartial answer to that question. The states should do everything within their power to cooperate with the commission, and that’s the bottom line.
Trump’s Department of Veteran Affairs is crushing it!

Don’t trust any national media to report on James Comey!

In Epshteyn’s June 11 “Bottom Line with Boris” segment, he covered former FBI director James Comey’s testimony before Congress on June 9. Epshteyn’s commentary did not focus on the substance of the hearing, but rather on three aspects Epshteyn says the “national media” failed to cover, including its own “inaccurate” reporting on Russia.

There are more examples at the link.

This is very disturbing stuff. This is local TV, not cable which most people assume to be well … local. It has a level of credibility with many Americans who mistrust the national networks. And this is pure propaganda.

And by the way, Boris Epshteyn’s connected to all the Russia stuff too… 

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