772 search results for ""voter fraud""

The schoolhouse door again
by Tom Sullivan

Vivian Malone entering Foster Auditorium to register for classes at the University of Alabama. (Library of Congress)

Why?

Yes, yes, discrimination against white people is just the sort of rumor Fox News enjoys throwing gasoline on for days at a time. But now the Trump Justice Department is getting in on the act.

A document obtained by the New York Times indicates the Justice Department’s civil rights division plans to sue universities that discriminate against white applicants in favor of minority ones:

The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

“Intentional race-based discrimination” would seem to cover affirmative action efforts in place for decades. Never mind that the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in a Texas case just last year that universities had “considerable deference” in how to administer affirmative action programs. That Justice Samuel Alito called the ruling “affirmative action gone berzerk” was probably enough for Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The Washington Post’s account adds that officials within the civil rights division refused to work on the project, seeing it as contrary to the department’s longstanding approach to expanding educational opportunities. So the political division took over. Vanita Gupta, former head of the civil rights division under the Obama administration called the project “an affront to our values as a country and the very mission of the civil rights ­division.” She told the Post:

“Long-standing Supreme Court precedent has upheld the constitutionality and compelling state interest of these policies, and generations of Americans have benefited from richer, more inclusive institutions of higher education,” Gupta said.

Now, it is not as if discrimination against white people is an impossibility. Certainly current demographic trends make people accustomed to seeing this as a white, Christians-only country are nervous about being on the receiving rather than the giving end of racial discrimination. But other than Fox News’ interest in boosting its ratings, who is pushing for targeting universities on this? Neither report says.

In the past, conservative politicians went after universities as centers of liberal strength they meant to weaken. What is novel here, other than the attempt to intimidate universities and fuel the culture war, is the attempt to limit the access to them by non-whites by claiming it is whites facing discrimination. Not that Sessions fans are clamoring to get into engineering or law schools and failing to. But keeping others out of “white” institutions has a long tradition in places Sessions finds support, even among those who themselves will never attend. Discrimination is about maintaining the establish pecking order.

This Justice Department effort grows from another conservative tradition: “wedging.” Urban vs. rural, us vs. Them. Keeping resentment properly stoked is good politics out in red America. Slate‘s Isaac Chotiner spoke with political scientist Katherine J. Cramer who has studied voters in rural Wisconsin. Cramer tell him in spite of being city dwellers, Gov. Scott Walker and Donald Trump are masters of tapping rural resentment:

You can’t separate culture and economics. When people are telling me that they’re not getting their fair share, and they’re feeling like all the taxpayer dollars go to the cities, and that they pay in a lot of taxes but they don’t see that money in return, they’re also telling me, “That money is going to people who don’t deserve it as much as I do, and don’t seem to be working as hard as I do.” And some of that is racist sentiment. Whether we’re talking about cultural issues in terms of race or ethnicity or immigration, we’re also talking about it in terms of just the lifestyles of city people versus the lifestyles of people in rural areas, and the sense of who works hard: People who sit behind a desk all day or people who are doing manual labor? Economic insecurity is intertwined with their sense of deservingness, which is a very cultural notion. So in my mind you can’t really separate the two.

Or who deserves to get into college and who doesn’t. The Justice Department investigating universities isn’t any more about discrimination against white people than the president’s voter fraud commission is about election integrity. It is about keeping Republican base voters engaged for the next election. “Real Americans” consider any election they lose discrimination against them too.

* * * * * * * *

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

by digby

I think this is probably somewhat correct in that it’s hard to imagine that anyone could consciously lie about absolutely everything as Trump does:

On Sunday morning’s broadcast of CNN’s Reliable Sources, White House advisor Kellyanne Conway continued to wage war on the media—and CNN specifically—by arguing the network shouldn’t be so critical toward the president because Donald Trump simply doesn’t know any better. 

Conway took umbrage with the media’s insistence on covering such “non-stories” as the president of the United States continually lying to the American public. After host Brian Stelter argued that his network was committed to covering the many scandals emanating from the White House, an incredulous Conway pushed back, demanding to know what “scandals” Stelter was referring to. 

“The scandals are about the president’s lies,” replied Stelter. “About voter fraud; about wire-tapping; his repeated lies about those issues. That’s the scandal.”
Despite overwhelming evidence that the White House is indeed lying in both of those cases—there is zero evidence to support Donald Trump’s claim that 3 million people voted illegally, or that his office was wire-tapped—the administration continues to promise “investigations” into both matters. But Conway’s response on Sunday was a new approach to how the administration handles allegations of lying. 

“[Donald Trump] doesn’t think he’s lying about those issues, and you know it,” she said.

Sure, a lot of what he says are conscious, outright lies. We know that. But it’s also clear that he’s addled and out of touch with reality.  It’s hard to tell the difference, I understand that. But as Steltzer went on to point out, just because Trump believes his own lies it doesn’t make them true.

.

Gold braid and mirrored sunglasses
by Tom Sullivan

Still from The In-Laws (1979).

The local board of elections made me the Democratic judge in my precinct in the very first election I voted in. My father thought it would be a lesson in democracy, I guess, one I could get paid for if I applied to be an election worker. But since we have the same first name, the board mistakenly thought the application came from him and put me in charge. At age 18.

County parties here this summer, in the slow, odd-numbered years, are assembling lists of election workers for the next 2-year cycle. It is essentially a volunteer job, community service with a stipend. People don’t do this for the money. Mostly, older people volunteer in that window between retirement and no longer being able to stand the 15-hour day. Finding replacements when the stalwarts age out is tough.

In the last week, two women called worried that personal information such as social security and drivers license numbers would be given to Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state leading up President Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity. One, a Latina, was especially worried her voter registration information would be used to target her. Her name, like mine, is not uncommon. And being a Latino, she worried about being caught up in Kobach’s fraud-fishing net. I can relate. For years, I told her, I was not the only one with my name in my own neighborhood. I sometimes break the ice in meetings by explaining I am not the Fox Business guy who fills in for Rush Limbaugh. How easy it would be for us both to get netted by Kobach’s bad data matching program.

Working inside the process, it is stunning how at odds with the fantastical, Republican rhetoric reality is. Safeguarding people’s right to vote is a big deal for these volunteers. Ensuring people can vote and that the process is fair is a passion. Most (though not all) of our GOP counterparts here in this work respect the process. We who work elections know what a fraud “voter fraud” is, which makes us, I guess, both smarter than the president and/or smart enough to be president.

This morning, the New York Times again inveighs against this massive snipe hunt and national effort at voter intimidation:

It was born out of a marriage of convenience between conservative anti-voter-fraud crusaders, who refuse to accept actual data, and a president who refuses to accept that he lost the popular vote fair and square.

It is run by some of the nation’s most determined vote suppressors, the kind who try to throw out voter registrations for being printed on insufficiently thick paper or who release reports on noncitizen voting that are titled “Alien Invasion” and illustrated with images of U.F.O.s.

Its purpose is not to restore integrity to elections but to undermine the public’s confidence enough to push through policies and practices that make registration and voting harder, if not impossible, for certain groups of people who tend to vote Democratic.

The Times calls it “a far greater threat to electoral integrity than whatever wrongdoing it may claim to dig up.” It is another example of the bad faith politics endemic at the highest level of the Republican Party.

The Week‘s Damon Linker believes the Kobach nonsense is symptomatic of a deeper anti-democratic bent in his party. Republican lawmakers’ acquiescence in the face of Trump’s insistence on personal loyalty and vapid expressions of “concern’ demonstrate they are “perfectly fine with Trump acting more like a kleptocratic despot than the head of the executive branch of a democratic republic.”

But that was just a warm-up:

There is, to begin with, the bill that would make it a federal crime (a felony punishable by up to a $1 million fine and 20 years in prison) to support the international boycott against Israel for its occupation of the West Bank. That 14 Democratic senators have joined with 29 Republicans in backing this flagrant assault on the First Amendment is certainly shameful, but it does nothing to diminish the outrageousness of those who like to portray themselves as courageous defenders of free speech endorsing a bill that would drastically curtail it. (And no, I don’t support the movement to boycott Israel, just the right of others to do so, which is exactly the way liberal democracy is supposed to work.)

Even worse is the Justice Department’s announcement on Wednesday that it is reviving the practice of allowing “state and local law enforcement officials to use federal law to seize the cash, cars, or other personal property of people suspected of crimes but not charged.” This practice, known as civil asset forfeiture, has been widely abused by police departments across the country in what amounts to government-backed theft from citizens who are supposed to be constitutionally protected from having their property seized without due process of law. That’s why state and local governments, along with the Obama Justice Department, have acted to curtail the practice. But now, in a full-frontal assault on civil liberties, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has given local police departments a way to circumvent these restrictions.

Of course, Linker saves his harshest criticism for Kobach and his phony commission, calling it “a full-frontal assault on the core liberal democratic institution of free and fair elections.” The Times wonders whether it is just a callous attempt to boost Republican’s electoral clout or if “they actually believe their own paranoid fantasies.”

The least banana Republicans could do is wear more gold braid and mirrored sunglasses.

A commission with a mission

by digby

I wrote about the voter fraud commission for Salon this morning:

President Trump had a very, very big day yesterday. In fact, he was almost manic running from one meeting to the other, speaking before cameras with what seemed to be barely contained rage and ending it with a devastating, incoherent, rambling interview with the New York Times. He must be all worn out.

But he also had photo-ops and made some remarks earlier in the day which were a bit more substantive, if no more coherent or prudent. After the failure of the latest iteration of Trumpcare, the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act, the president dragged all the GOP Senators to the White House for lunch and then humiliated some of them before the cameras by threatening their jobs. This gives you the flavor of how it went:

But, Trump’s first meeting of the day had been his surprise welcome to his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. You’ll recall that he promised to put that together after he made the ridiculous claim that Hillary Clinton hadn’t really won the popular vote because 3 million “illegals” had voted in California. It took a while but one of his biggest supporters, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has made vote suppression his life’s work, came in board and it’s finally up and running. (I wrote about Kobach here, here and here.)

Trump named Kobach and Vice President Mike Pence as co-chairs and almost immediately the commission was embroiled in controversy. Kobach had instituted a plan that would kick eligible voters off the rolls in his home state of Kansas and he wanted to take it national so his first step was to cause a national firestorm by requesting all personal voter information from each state, which most secretaries of state of both parties refused.

Now lawsuits are rolling in from all over the country regarding the commission’s lack of transparency and violations of federal regulations and privacy laws. Kobach was served with a suit claiming that he’s illegally exploiting his position to promote his candidacy for governor of Kansas and is being investigated by the Kansas Supreme Court for ironically refusing to turn over documents to the court. Democratic lawmakers have sent an official notice requesting that Kobach be removed from the commission for violations of the Hatch Act and and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. All in all, it’s off to a terrific start.

Wednesday morning, Pence opened the proceedings by saying the commission “has no preconceived notions or preordained results. We’re fact-finders. And in the days ahead, we will gather the relevant facts and data, and at the conclusion of our work, we will present the president with a report of our findings.” But whatever hopes Pence had of keeping the pretense of nonpartisan fact-finding were blown to kingdom come when the president took the mic and started talking about the need for the states get with the program:

If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they’re worried about. And I ask the vice president and I ask the commission: What are they worried about? There’s something. There always is. 

This issue is very important to me because throughout the campaign and even after, people would come up to me and express their concerns about voter inconsistencies and irregularities which they saw, in some cases, having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states.

Trump said for months that the electoral system was rigged and even said at a presidential debate that he might not accept the results. Of course people come up to him and say they know about some instance of voter fraud.

His real gripe is that he didn’t win the popular vote and is driven by some egomaniacal need to be able to at least create the possibility that he actually did. Kris Kobach went on MSNBC yesterday and gave an astonishing interview that surely pleased him:

KATY TUR (HOST): Do you believe Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 to 5 million votes because of voter fraud?
KRIS KOBACH: We may never know the answer to that — we will probably never know the answer to that question, because even if you could prove that a certain number of votes were cast by ineligible voters, for example —

TUR: So, again, you think that maybe Hillary Clinton did not win the popular vote?

KOBACH: We may never know the answer to that question.

That’s an outrageous assertion. It is completely impossible that 3 million votes were cast illegally in 2016. In a world that makes sense he would have been fired immediately for casting such a shadow over the electoral results. There have been more than nine major investigations into alleged “voter fraud” and it just does not exist on even a small systematic scale much less something like what he’s suggesting.

One can only imagine what the boss had to say when he heard this follow up, though:

TUR: So were the votes for Donald Trump that led him to win the election in doubt as well?
KOBACH: Absolutely. If there are ineligible voters in an election, people who are noncitizens, people who are felons who shouldn’t be voting according to the laws of that state —

So Trump’s rather pathetic 77,000 vote Electoral College win is also in doubt? Oh my.

But Trump needn’t worry. Kobach is a conservative extremist whose life’s work is preventing people from voting. That’s what this is about. Trump’s victory will never be questioned by him.

There is one slight mystery about all this, however. With all this talk of our electoral system being vulnerable to fraud the commission isn’t the least bit interested in the subject of Russian interference in the election. That seems odd.

Of course if the goal of the hacking was to create chaos sow the seeds of doubt about the integrity of our democracy the Russian government is probably are wondering why they went to the trouble. Kris Kobach and his friends are doing a fine job of that all on their own. If he could manage to get all that voter information for them in one place that would be very helpful for future hacking. They’re pulling for his success if no one else is.

.

Trump’s herrenvolk

by digby

I’m sick to death of reading about Trump voters as if they are the holy grail of politics. They are a distinct minority of people in this country and just because they managed to eke out a win for their malignant leader doesn’t mean that we have to hang on their every word.

Having said that, this article by Peter Hessler in the New Yorker about the Trump voters in rural Colorado is quite interesting. The angle is how Trump is transforming rural culture in America. Here’s a short excerpt:

Last October, three weeks before the election, Donald Trump visited Grand Junction for a rally in an airport hangar. Along with other members of the press, I was escorted into a pen near the back, where a metal fence separated us from the crowd. At that time, some prominent polls showed Clinton leading by more than ten percentage points, and Trump often claimed that the election might be rigged. During the rally he said, “There’s a voter fraud also with the media, because they so poison the minds of the people by writing false stories.” He pointed in our direction, describing us as “criminals,” among other things: “They’re lying, they’re cheating, they’re stealing! They’re doing everything, these people right back here!”

The attacks came every few minutes, and they served as a kind of tether to the speech. The material could have drifted off into abstraction—e-mails, Benghazi, the Washington swamp. But every time Trump pointed at the media, the crowd turned, and by the end people were screaming and cursing at us. One man tried to climb over the barrier, and security guards had to drag him away.

Such behavior is out of character for residents of rural Colorado, where politeness and public decency are highly valued. Erin McIntyre, a Grand Junction native who works for the Daily Sentinel, the local paper, stood in the crowd, where the people around her screamed at the journalists: “Lock them up!” “Hang them all!” “Electric chair!” Afterward, McIntyre posted a description of the event on Facebook. “I thought I knew Mesa County,” she wrote. “That’s not what I saw yesterday. And it scared me.”

Before Trump took office, people I met in Grand Junction emphasized pragmatic reasons for supporting him. The economy was in trouble, and Trump was a businessman who knew how to make rational, profit-oriented decisions. Supporters almost always complained about some aspect of his character, but they also believed that these flaws were likely to help him succeed in Washington. “I’m not voting for him to be my pastor,” Kathy Rehberg, a local real-estate agent, said. “I’m voting for him to be President. If I have rats in my basement, I’m going to try to find the best rat killer out there. I don’t care if he’s ugly or if he’s sociable. All I care about is if he kills rats.”

“Don’t worry, we only went out once. I never saw him naked—not until now, of course.”

After the turbulent first two months of the Administration, I met again with Kathy Rehberg and her husband, Ron. They were satisfied with Trump’s performance, and their complaints about his behavior were mild. “I think some of it is funny, how he doesn’t let people push him around,” Ron Rehberg said. Over time, such remarks became more common. “I hate to say it, but I wake up in the morning looking forward to what else is coming,” Ray Scott, a Republican state senator who had campaigned for Trump, told me in June. One lawyer said bluntly, “I get a kick in the ass out of him.” The calculus seemed to have shifted: Trump’s negative qualities, which once had been described as a means to an end, now had value of their own. The point wasn’t necessarily to get things done; it was to retaliate against the media and other enemies. This had always seemed fundamental to Trump’s appeal, but people had been less likely to express it so starkly before he entered office. “For those of us who believe that the media has been corrupt for a lot of years, it’s a way of poking at the jellyfish,” Karen Kulp told me in late April. “Just to make them mad.”

In Grand Junction, people wanted Trump to accomplish certain things with the pragmatism of a businessman, but they also wanted him to make them feel a certain way. The assumption has always been that, while emotional appeal might have mattered during the campaign, the practical impact of a Trump Presidency would prove more important. Liberals claimed that Trump would fail because his policies would hurt the people who had voted for him.

But the lack of legislative accomplishment seems only to make supporters take more satisfaction in Trump’s behavior. And thus far the President’s tone, rather than his policies, has had the greatest impact on Grand Junction. This was evident even before the election, with the behavior of supporters at the candidate’s rally, the conflicts within the local Republican Party, and an increased distrust of anything having to do with government. Sheila Reiner, a Republican who serves as the county clerk, said that during the campaign she had dealt with many allegations of fraud following Trump’s claims that the election could be rigged. “People came in and said, ‘I want to see where you’re tearing up the ballots!’ ” Reiner told me. Reiner and her staff gave at least twenty impromptu tours of their office, in an attempt to convince voters that the Republican county clerk wasn’t trying to throw the election to Clinton.

The Daily Sentinel publishes editorials from both the right and the left, and it didn’t endorse a Presidential candidate. But supporters picked up on Trump’s obsession with crowd size, repeatedly accusing the Sentinel of underestimating attendance at rallies. The paper ran a story about vandalism of political signs, with examples given from both campaigns, but readers were outraged that the photograph featured only a torn Clinton banner. The Sentinel immediately ran a second article with a photograph of a vandalized Trump sign. When Erin McIntyre described the Grand Junction rally on Facebook, online attacks by Trump supporters were so vicious that she feared for her safety. After three days, she deleted the post.

In February, a bill that was intended to give journalists better access to government records was introduced in a Colorado senate committee, which was chaired by Ray Scott, a Republican. The process was delayed for unknown reasons, and the Sentinel published an editorial with a mild prompt: “We call on our own Sen. Scott to announce a new committee hearing date and move this bill forward.” Scott responded with a series of Trump-style tweets. “We have our own fake news in Grand Junction,” he wrote. “The very liberal GJ Sentinel is attempting to apply pressure for me to move a bill.”

Jay Seaton, the Sentinel’s publisher, threatened to sue Scott for defamation. In an editorial, he wrote, “When a state senator accused The Sentinel of being fake news, he was deliberately attempting to delegitimize a credible news source in order to avoid being held accountable by it.” The Huffington Post and other national outlets mentioned the spat. When I met with Scott, he seemed pleased by the attention. A burly, friendly man who works as a contractor, he told me, “I was kind of Trumpish before Trump was cool.”

“We used to just take it on the chin if somebody said something about us,” he said. “The fake-news thing became the popular thing to say, because of Trump.” He believed that Trump has performed a service by popularizing the term. “I’ve seen journalists like yourself doing a better job,” Scott told me. He’s considering a run for governor, in part because of Trump’s example. “People are looking for something different,” he said. “They’re looking for somebody who means what they say.”

He is their safe space who allows them to believe whatever they want to believe because anything that doesn’t comport can be dismissed as “fake.” It must be so comforting.

The whole article is quite disturbing. I personally blame social media which is delivering what used to only be delivered by Fox and talk radio — alternate reality (Trump means what he says? In fact, he says whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear. But you knew that) but in the hands of people you know and trust.  It’s also making it easy to organize your own fanatical group. The left is doing it too, of course. That’s the Resistance.This is the Counter-Resistance.

This is all very depressing. According to the article, these folks are still mourning the loss of Exxon jobs that left in 1982 — 35 years ago — and don’t want to work in the new industries like health care and education, probably because they don’t pay as well or have the same cachet as the macho oil field jobs. The loss of oil jobs has become a become an inter-generational identity.

This is not about issues, though, not really. I’m not even sure it’s about status. I think it might be just about alienation and loneliness. It seems to me that what these people were yearning for was a shared purpose, something they could do together. Trump activated that by naming and pointing at their common enemies. Us.

Trump let the raging right wing id out of the bottle, let it wail, made it fun, made it social, opened up a world in which they could all meet each other and share a communal space, free to let their freak flags fly unlike the greater world which circumscribes their true feelings.

Anyway, that’s about all the time I have this week for pondering that vast neediness of the Trump voter. It’s interesting, even necessary to look at it. But in the end, they are no more important than the Latino cook in New Mexico or the young female retail clerk in suburban Maryland or the African American insurance company manager in Illinois. This is a very big country and we all have our issues, we all have our needs. This focus on this one group is creating a sense that only they represent the true character of our country and everyone else is going to have to adjust to it.

No. The have the same rights and responsibilities as all Americans but they only represent themselves. There are hundreds of millions of us who don’t agree with them.

.

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?

Deja vu all over again

by digby

A man by the name of Hans Von Spakovsky has been named to the president’s Federal Vote Suppression Commission. Of course.

Here’s something I wrote about this miscreant ten long years ago. (Some of the links don’t work anymore unfortunately.)

Thursday, April 19, 2007

 
Hans Across America

by digby

Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been writing about the same things over and over again for years and it never adds up to anything. But in the case of this “voter fraud” issues, I have been concerned about what the Bush administration was up to for some time and it appears to be adding up to something quite huge. (Of course, I’m not the only one who was following this — many people knew it was happening.)

Today, McClatchy has a barn burner of an article about the Bush administration’s efforts to suppress the vote. It’s no longer possible to argue with a straight face that they didn’t use the power of the Justice Department for partisan reasons. The Bush administration has been pursuing phony voter fraud like it was a massive scourge, helping states enact all kinds of specious laws that only result in disenfranchising legitimate voters — the kind who tend to vote Democratic. (I wonder why?)

Read the whole article and then come on back and we’ll unpack just a tiny little piece of it, blog style.

Longtime readers will recall that way back when I wrote a bit about “Buckhead” the man who miraculously discovered in a few short moments that the kerning and fonts of the Dan Rather memos were “off” and put his “findings” up on Free Republic. You all know the results of his magnificent bit of internet sleuthing. In researching Buckhead, whose real name is Harry McDougal, I found out that in addition to being a member of the Federalist Society and someone who helped write anti-Clinton briefs for Kenneth Starr, he was a member of the Fulton County elections board which ruled that the extremely dubious Sonny Perdue and Saxby Chambliss wins in 2002 were perfectly a-ok. The guy got around.

It turned out that another interesting Republican fellow had previously been on that elections board by the name of Hans von Spakovsky, whom you just read about in that McClatchy piece. He was hired by the Bush Justice Department’s civil right’s division shortly after his stint down in Florida during the recount. Anyway, Von Spakovsky is not just another Atlanta lawyer. He had for years been involved with a GOP front group called the “Voter Integrity Project” (VIP) which was run by none other than Helen Blackwell, wife of notorious conservative operative Morton Blackwell. (Many of you will remember him as the guy who handed out the “purple heart” bandages at the 2004 GOP convention but he’s actually much better known for years of running the dirty tricks school “The Leadership Institute” and is even credited with coining the name “Moral Majority.” Let’s just say he’s been a playah in GOP circles for a long time — and the VIP is one of his projects.

Salon published a piece on the Voter Integrity Project back in 2000:

VIP chairwoman of the board is Helen Blackwell, also the Virginia chairwoman of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, whose husband, Morton, serves as executive director of the conservative Council for National Policy. It took lumps for being partisan earlier this year from Slate writer Jeremy Derfner. “In fact, almost everything about the Voting Integrity Project makes you wonder. Though VIP’s members assert that they are both independent and nonpartisan, the organization is essentially a conservative front,” Derfner wrote.

VIP has vigorously opposed efforts to liberalize voting procedures — railing against everything from Internet voting to Oregon’s mail-in balloting to the Motor Voter bill. But it is VIP’s involvement in partisan political fights that makes Democrats charge the group is a Republican front group.

VIP sent investigators into largely black areas in Louisiana after Mary Landrieu’s 1996 U.S. Senate victory over Republican Woody Jenkins.

“The VIP conducted its investigation over a 10-day period from December 26 through January 4, during which time they concentrated on the Orleans Parish voting activities,” a VIP release says. “The VIP examined and independently verified substantial amounts of evidence gathered by the Jenkins campaign, as well as gathering its own evidence concerning vote buying, vote hauling and improprieties by elections officials tasked with protecting voting machines.”

VIP chairwoman Helen Blackwell told the Senate Rules Committee, “Many claims of the Jenkins campaign have merit and should be investigated to the fullest extent of the law.”

In a few short years, former VIP lawyer Von Spakovsky, who had made his name calling for voter roll purges in Georgia, was working in the Justice Department, with the full resources of the federal government behind him.

From the McClatchy article:

In late 2001, Ashcroft also hired three Republican political operatives to work in a secretive new unit in the division’s Voting Rights Section. Rich said the unit, headed by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Mark Metcalf of Kentucky, bird-dogged the progress of the administration’s Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and reviewed voting legislation in the states.

One member of the three-person political unit, former Georgia elections official and Republican activist Hans von Spakovsky, eventually took de facto control of the Voting Rights Section and used his position to advocate tougher voter ID laws, said former department lawyers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals.

Those former employees said that Spakovsky helped state officials interpret the Help America Vote Act’s confusing new minimum voter identification requirements. He also weighed in when the Voting Rights Act required department approval for any new ID law in 13 states with histories of racial discrimination.

In November 2004, Arizona residents passed Proposition 200, the toughest state voter ID law to date, which requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship and voters to produce a photo ID on Election Day. The Voting Rights Act state requires states to show that such laws wouldn’t impede minorities from voting and gives the Justice Department 60 days to approve or oppose them.

Career voting rights specialists in the Justice Department soon discovered that more than 2,000 elderly Indians in Arizona lacked birth certificates, and they sought their superiors’ approval to request more information from the state about other potential impacts on voters’ rights. Spakovsky and Sheldon Bradshaw, the division’s top deputy and a close friend of top Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, a former Bush White House lawyer, denied the request, said one of the former department attorneys.

Jeffrey Toobin wrote an article back in 2004 about this subject which everyone who is following this case should read (or re-read) to see just how pervasive this “voter fraud” initiative was in the Bush Justice department. Karl Rove was almost certainly running it from the white house. But it was being pushed from throughout the Republican establishment that had recognized for years that they couldn’t win fair and square. I think 2000 scared the hell out of them. If it hadn’t been for Ralph Nader and Jebby and Poppy’s political machines they would have lost that one and they had put everything they had into winning it.

So where is our friend Von Spakovsky now?

Saturday, December 17, 2005

President Bush nominated two controversial lawyers to the Federal Election Commission yesterday: Hans von Spakovsky who helped Georgia win approval of a disputed voter-identification law, and Robert D. Lenhard, who was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Von Spakovsky and Mason are Republican appointees, while Lenhard and Walther are Democratic picks for the bipartisan six-member commission.

In a letter to Senate Rules Committee Chairman Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) wrote that he is “extremely troubled” by the von Spakovsky nomination. Kennedy contends that von Spakovsky “may be at the heart of the political interference that is undermining the [Justice] Department’s enforcement of federal civil laws.”

Career Justice Department lawyers involved in a Georgia case said von Spakovsky pushed strongly for approval of a state program requiring voters to have photo identification. A team of staff lawyers that examined the case recommended 4 to 1 that the Georgia plan should be rejected because it would harm black voters; the recommendation was overruled by von Spakovsky and other senior officials in the Civil Rights Division.

Before working in the Justice Department, von Spakovsky was the Republican Party chairman in Fulton County, Ga., and served on the board of the Voter Integrity Project, which advocated regular purging of voter roles to prevent felons from casting ballots.

In a brief telephone interview, von Spakovsky played down his role in policy decisions in the Civil Rights Division. “I’m just a career lawyer who works in the front office of civil rights,” he said. He noted that the department has rules against career lawyers talking to reporters.

That takes some gall, don’t you think? He actually tried to pass himself off as a career lawyer for the justice department when he was nothing but a political hack from the moment he hit DC. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Bush gave him a recess appointment a month later. A couple of months after that, this came out

I’m sure everyone is aware by now that the recent study by the NY Times pretty much takes voter fraud off the table as anything but a partisan Republican tool for suppressing the Democratic vote:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Frankly you had to be something of an historical illiterate not to recognize from the beginning that these folks are up to the same tricks they’ve been using for decades. They tried mightily, with everything they had, the federal government, the Republican Lawyers Association, the country awash in patriotic paranoia, and they still couldn’t prove this case — even crookedly they couldn’t do it. In fact, their insistence on finding it where there was none is what has caused their whole edifice to crumble.

Oh, and by the way, von Spakovsky has now been formally nominated by Bush to the FEC and will have to undergo Senate confirmation. Here’s a blistering critique of his performace at the DOJ as well as his predictably awful tenure on the FEC from a former attoreny in the civil rights division. He concludes:

But even putting aside his controversial tenure at DOJ, von Spakovsky’s performance at the FEC over the last year independently raises questions of whether he is worthy of Senate confirmation. His comments at FEC meetings have often been caustic and extraneous to the issue at hand. He has consistently scoffed at the spirit of campaign finance laws, thumbing his nose at the law as he seeks to help create routes of circumvention. He even accuses those reformers who seek regulation of the role of money in our political process as attempting to take us back to the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This is an easy accusation to make, and von Spakovsky has employed it a number of times, and it certainly is easier to attack those he disagrees with rather than to explain principled reasons for his own actions.

The Senate Rules Committee hearings will begin soon. When they do, the American people have the right to know all the details of von Spakovsky’s roles in both the Texas and Georgia matters, and his handling of FEC matters as a recess appointee. That record, if compiled, will make the vote on his confirmation quite easy.

Let’s hope so.

He ultimately withdrew his nomination. Bush got a man by the name of Don McGahn confirmed though. He defended Tom Delay in the lawsuit alleging that he unconstitutionally jacked the vote in Texas. (DeLay’s conviction was overturned on appeal.)

He’s Trump’s White House counsel now.

Let’s be honest. These guys specialize in stealing elections. It’s what they do. Now they are enthusiastically accepting the help of foreign agents to carry out their task.

.

“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.

Trump undermined his own legitimacy by what he said during the campaign

Of course he named Kobach to his vote suppression commission

by digby

Martin Longman at the Washington Monthly gives us the bad news:

The Minority Leader of the Kansas Senate Anthony Hensley once stated that Kobach is “the most racist politician in America today,” and with plenty of justification. Kobuch is the brains behind both Arizona SB 1070 and Alabama HB56, the two most notorious anti-immigrant bills to be produced in this country in recent decades. He’s the country’s most famous proponent of bogus voter fraud theories and has boasted of successful efforts to suppress the minority vote both during his time as chairman of the Kansas Republican Party and as Kansas’s Secretary of State.

He’s also a classic John Bircher-style nutcase who has referred to both the American Civil Liberties Union and the League of Women Voters as “communists.”

Donald Trump seriously considered Kobach to serve as his Attorney General and also as his Secretary of Homeland Security:

It was later reported that Kobach was being considered for Secretary of Homeland Security, and was photographed carrying a document entitled “Department of Homeland Security, Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 Days” into a meeting with Trump. This plan reportedly included a register of Muslims as part of a suite of proposals, which also included the “extreme vetting” of immigrants.

So, that’s all a prelude to discussing this:

President Trump plans to name Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has pressed for aggressive measures to crack down on undocumented immigrants, to a long-promised commission to investigate voting fraud in the United States, a White House official said on Thursday.

I’ve written dozens of posts and Salon articles on Kobach who is one of the most malevolent people in American politics.  I’m actually surprised they didn’t find a spot for him in the DOJ. He’s a top anti-immigration and vote suppression expert.

.