Trump questions states withholding voter data at election commission meeting for his authoritarian state
Jul 20, 2017 19:57:39 #
Trump: “If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they are worried about, and I asked the vice president, I asked the commission, what are they worried about? There's something, there always is." Yes, there is. Like the right to privacy. Protection against voter intimidation and suppression. Gerrymandering. And more.
And now Republicans are posing a serious challenge to Trump’s ballyhooed election-fraud commission.
Trump's Voter-Fraud Commission Makes Its First Move:
But first, let’s back up a step. The board has always looked like a cynical ploy. Stung by his failure to win the popular vote, even as the electoral college gave him the presidency, Trump has insisted that there were 3 to 5 million votes cast by ineligible voters during the presidential election. This number seems to be based on wildly speculative figures produced by an activist named Gregg Phillips.
A clique of conservatives has been warning for years that elections are irreparably tainted by vote fraud, but repeated investigations have failed to turn up meaningful numbers of fraudulent votes. Meanwhile, the laws that many states have passed, requiring photo ID to vote, making it harder to register and vote, and other changes, have disproportionately made it harder for minorities as well as students and the elderly—all Democratic constituencies—to vote. Some federal courts have even ruled that disenfranchising minorities is the goal of such laws.
Caught making baseless claims, Trump announced he would impanel a commission to investigate voter fraud. (This is a favorite move for the president: When he was caught making a baseless claim that Barack Obama had surveilled him, he demanded that intelligence agencies and Congress investigate his flight of fancy, then said the truth would only come out once those inquiries were completed.) The de facto leader of the commission is Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and one of the most outspoken and successful proponents of the claim of widespread voter fraud, who was twice successfully sued for voter suppression.
At the end of June, Kobach made his first big move, requesting all publicly available voter data from the states, including names, addresses, voting history, party affiliation, felony convictions, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. That’s in keeping with Kobach’s Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which has sought to create a database of registered voters across the entire country.
Unsurprisingly, several Democratic state secretaries of state (or their equivalents) immediately rejected the request. More interesting was the response by Republicans officials at the state level. A number of them have also rejected the request either in part or in full, citing taxpayer costs, privacy intrusions, or the fact that they doubt Kobach’s request can do much to stop fraud.
The most colorful response came from Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican.
“My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from,” he said in a 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.”
Other officials said that they were not legally permitted to disclose the data the commission requested. Maryland Secretary of State Luis Borunda, a member of the commission, resigned from the group without explanation. Ari Berman, a progressive journalist who covers voting issues closely, found that 45 states had rejected the request in part or in full.
Meanwhile, Michael Chertoff, a Republican who served as secretary of homeland security in the Bush administration, wrote in a Washington Post column on Thursday that Kobach’s attempt to gather so much personal information constitutes a grave threat to national security, because such a database would be vulnerable to hacking. The overall effect has been that Republican officials are creating a major obstacle to the Kobach commission putting together the database it sought.
That shouldn’t pose much of a danger to electoral integrity, though. If there were actually millions of ineligible voters casting ballots, it would have been detected before. A painstaking 2007 Department of Justice search failed to turn it up, as have other investigations. (Philip Bump illustrated the physical implausibility of these claims in October, too.) In-person voter fraud is extremely rare, yet voter-ID laws and databases like Interstate Crosscheck continue to focus on rooting it out. But simply matching names tends to turn up false positives. That’s something Kobach encountered in Kansas: After he dramatically announced that there were nearly 2,000 dead voters on state rolls, newspapers starting finding the alleged dead voters alive and well. Similar names often produce false positive results for fraudulent or duplicative registrations.
And now Republicans are posing a serious challenge to Trump’s ballyhooed election-fraud commission.
Trump's Voter-Fraud Commission Makes Its First Move:
But first, let’s back up a step. The board has always looked like a cynical ploy. Stung by his failure to win the popular vote, even as the electoral college gave him the presidency, Trump has insisted that there were 3 to 5 million votes cast by ineligible voters during the presidential election. This number seems to be based on wildly speculative figures produced by an activist named Gregg Phillips.
A clique of conservatives has been warning for years that elections are irreparably tainted by vote fraud, but repeated investigations have failed to turn up meaningful numbers of fraudulent votes. Meanwhile, the laws that many states have passed, requiring photo ID to vote, making it harder to register and vote, and other changes, have disproportionately made it harder for minorities as well as students and the elderly—all Democratic constituencies—to vote. Some federal courts have even ruled that disenfranchising minorities is the goal of such laws.
Caught making baseless claims, Trump announced he would impanel a commission to investigate voter fraud. (This is a favorite move for the president: When he was caught making a baseless claim that Barack Obama had surveilled him, he demanded that intelligence agencies and Congress investigate his flight of fancy, then said the truth would only come out once those inquiries were completed.) The de facto leader of the commission is Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and one of the most outspoken and successful proponents of the claim of widespread voter fraud, who was twice successfully sued for voter suppression.
At the end of June, Kobach made his first big move, requesting all publicly available voter data from the states, including names, addresses, voting history, party affiliation, felony convictions, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. That’s in keeping with Kobach’s Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which has sought to create a database of registered voters across the entire country.
Unsurprisingly, several Democratic state secretaries of state (or their equivalents) immediately rejected the request. More interesting was the response by Republicans officials at the state level. A number of them have also rejected the request either in part or in full, citing taxpayer costs, privacy intrusions, or the fact that they doubt Kobach’s request can do much to stop fraud.
The most colorful response came from Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican.
“My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from,” he said in a 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.”
Other officials said that they were not legally permitted to disclose the data the commission requested. Maryland Secretary of State Luis Borunda, a member of the commission, resigned from the group without explanation. Ari Berman, a progressive journalist who covers voting issues closely, found that 45 states had rejected the request in part or in full.
Meanwhile, Michael Chertoff, a Republican who served as secretary of homeland security in the Bush administration, wrote in a Washington Post column on Thursday that Kobach’s attempt to gather so much personal information constitutes a grave threat to national security, because such a database would be vulnerable to hacking. The overall effect has been that Republican officials are creating a major obstacle to the Kobach commission putting together the database it sought.
That shouldn’t pose much of a danger to electoral integrity, though. If there were actually millions of ineligible voters casting ballots, it would have been detected before. A painstaking 2007 Department of Justice search failed to turn it up, as have other investigations. (Philip Bump illustrated the physical implausibility of these claims in October, too.) In-person voter fraud is extremely rare, yet voter-ID laws and databases like Interstate Crosscheck continue to focus on rooting it out. But simply matching names tends to turn up false positives. That’s something Kobach encountered in Kansas: After he dramatically announced that there were nearly 2,000 dead voters on state rolls, newspapers starting finding the alleged dead voters alive and well. Similar names often produce false positive results for fraudulent or duplicative registrations.
Jul 20, 2017 20:05:57 #
proud republican
Loc: RED CALIFORNIA
Whats he asking is already public, So i dont see iwhy this is such a big deal. Actually i know why,,,,,TRUMHYSTERIA
Jul 20, 2017 20:07:26 #
Ooph wrote:
Actually He WAS Winning The Popular Vote Until California Came InStung by his failure to win the popular vote
Hillary Can Be President Of California And Queens, NY.
We Won't Miss 'Em...
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