VOTER ID / fraud 2

see main Disenfranchise voters (only felon?)

note it is voter SUPPRESSION, // sci, activist, press

promoted primary aha PIC

capt 3/18

vs election fraud tamper

see illegal alien

SEE VOTER SUPPR 3 5

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comm cause sac bee

Backers of a proposition that would require California voters to show government ID before voting have pitched the measure as a commonsense, bipartisan reform with broad public support.

In public appearances, they’ve separated their effort from President Donald Trump’s divisive SAVE America Act, a farther-reaching election administration bill that has stalled in Congress.

But so far, the movement to pass the California measure has drawn heavy support from a Republican state lawmaker, his conservative following, and a group of billionaires — many with a recent history of backing Trump and the GOP.

Backers of Proposition 39, which would also require voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, raised more than $10 million so far. The bulk of that total came from large-dollar donors who helped pay for signature gatherers to get the measure on the ballot.

Volunteers from Reform California, a conservative group spearheaded by Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, R-Valley Center, also played a major role in gathering signatures.

At least nine billionaires, as tracked by Forbes’ list, have invested in the fundraising committee Californians for Voter ID, which is run by Julie Luckey, the mother of tech billionaire and Trump supporter Palmer Luckey.

The top donor is Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein, who contributed $4 million. Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth, were the fourth-largest donors to federal elections from 2023 to 2024, according to the nonpartisan campaign finance site OpenSecrets. A 2022 ProPublica investigation found the couple backed candidates and groups promoting false claims surrounding the 2020 election.

Other billionaire donors include:

Attorney Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 vice presidential candidate, gave $370,000.
Venture capitalist Douglas Leone contributed $250,000.
Twin investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss each gave $250,000.
Investor Aubrey Chernick gave $150,000 and his wife, Joyce Chernick, added another $25,000.
Venture capitalist Tim Draper contributed $50,000.
Los Angeles real estate developer Rick Caruso gave $25,000.

Many of the donors have ties to Republicans.

Shanahan endorsed Trump when she and Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race. Leone gave $2 million to Ron DeSantis in his failed 2024 presidential bid, and later, more than $2 million toward electing Trump.

The Winklevoss twins each contributed $1 million toward boosting Trump in 2024 and millions more to other GOP committees in recent years.

The Chernicks made maximum contributions to GOP gubernatorial hopeful Steve Hilton and have given hundreds of thousands more to Republicans in Congress.

Draper and Caruso cut a different profile.

Draper has donated to candidates from both parties, including Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris. He is also funding a new political committee, Grow California, that aims to elect business-friendly candidates to the Legislature.

Caruso ran for LA mayor as a centrist Democrat, but was previously a registered Republican.

An April poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies found 56% of respondents supported the voter ID provision. Support dropped to 39% after they were given more context about the measure’s sponsor and opponents.

In an interview, DeMaio dismissed any suggestion that conservatives were providing the animating support for his ballot measure.

“A lot of people are sick and tired of the conspiracy theories and don’t want to have low public trust and confidence in elections, and they see voter ID as the common sense bipartisan way to fix it,” DeMaio said. “Why is that such a mystery?”

Tenoch Flores, a spokesperson for No on Prop. 39, a coalition seeking to stop the measure, said it was being driven by “MAGA partisans and right-wing billionaires trying to rig elections in their favor.”

Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican consultant, argued both sides were being disingenuous. He cast doubt on liberals’ claims that photo ID would meaningfully suppress voters and said conservatives’ accusations of widespread fraud had never been borne out by evidence.

Instead, he argued this year’s ballot measure was fundamentally a tool to boost GOP turnout.

“The Winklevoss twins and the venture capitalists don’t care about voter ID,” he said. “They care about a Republican Congress.”

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CA PROP 39 PLUTO

Common Cause

https://www.commoncause.org › california › articles › right-leaning-billionaires-help-bankroll-california-voter-id-ballot-measure

Right-leaning billionaires help bankroll California voter ID ballot ...

Jul 13, 2026The top donor is Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein, who contributed $4 million. Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth, were the fourth-largest donors to federal elections from 2023 to 2024, according to the nonpartisan campaign finance site OpenSecrets.

Yahoo

https://www.yahoo.com › news › politics › articles › meet-illinois-billionaire-whos-poured-204805361.html

Meet the Illinois billionaire who's poured $17M into Prop 39 ... - Yahoo

Sep 21, 2026The next single-largest donation of about $1 million came from Reform California, Assembly Member Carl DeMaio's PAC. DeMaio, R-San Diego, is one of two Republican state lawmakers who filed Prop 39.

San Francisco Chronicle

https://www.sfchronicle.com › politics › article › richard-uihlein-prop-39-22438880.php

Illinois billionaire pours $17M into California voter ID campaign

Sep 21, 2026Richard Uihlein, cofounder of a leading shipping and packaging company, has been a prominent Republican donor since the 1990s.

The Sacramento Bee

https://www.sacbee.com › news › politics-government › capitol-alert › article316461529.html

Billionaires fuel California voter ID Proposition 39 effort ...

Jul 13, 2026Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth, were the fourth-largest donors to federal elections from 2023 to 2024, according to the nonpartisan campaign finance site Open Secrets.

AP News

https://apnews.com › article › california-voter-id-republican-funding-4247a4be55bc677c916eb4450b345db3

Why are out-of-state billionaires funding a California voter ID measure ...

Oct 7, 2026Uihlein is joined by Southern California businessman Steven Bray, who loaned the campaign more than $3 million and gave $50,000 outright. The right-wing political group Reform California, tech entrepreneurs Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and former Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential running mate Nicole Shanahan are also major donors.

PressReader.com

https://www.pressreader.com › usa › san-francisco-chronicle-late-edition › 20260923 › 281500758166799

Big donor backs ID measure with $17M - PressReader

Sep 23, 2026The ACLU of Northern California and the California Donor Table, a group that supports progressive candidates, have both donated to defeat the voter ID law. The opposition's top individual donors include Netflix founder Reed Hastings ($1 million) and his wife, Patty Quillin ($1.5 million) as well

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trib

The League of United Latin American Citizens plans to request a federal investigation into raids Attorney General Ken Paxton conducted this week as part of what he called an “ongoing election integrity investigation.”

Gabriel Rosales, Texas LULAC’s state director, said in a statement that Paxton carried out the raids 11 weeks before the 2024 elections “to suppress the Latino vote through intimidation and any means necessary to tilt the electoral process in favor of his political allies.”

Agents raided the home of Cecilia Castellano — the Democrat running to succeed state Rep. Tracy King, D-Uvalde — and confiscated her phone as part of the search, according to Rosales. Republicans see that seat, which Gov. Greg Abbott carried by nearly 6 percentage points, as their best potential state House flip in November.

Law enforcement also searched the homes of at least five other Latino individuals, all of whom were working on Castellano’s campaign and three of whom are members of Texas LULAC, Rosales added. LULAC is a non-partisan, volunteer-based Hispanic civil rights organization headquartered in Washington.

The group is in the dark about the details of any accusations, Rosales said, “but there's none that we’ve been privy to that merits an investigation like this that wastes taxpayers’ money.”

“It is disgraceful and outrageous that the state of Texas, and its highest-ranking law enforcement officer is once again using the power of his office to instill fear in the hearts of community members who volunteer their time to promote civic engagement,” Rosales said in a statement.

Paxton announced on Wednesday that his office executed “multiple” search warrants in Frio, Atascosa and Bexar counties the day prior as part of an investigation into allegations of “election fraud and vote harvesting that occurred during the 2022 elections.” A two-year investigation, Paxton said, provided “sufficient evidence” to obtain the search warrants.

“Secure elections are the cornerstone of our republic,” Paxton said in a statement. “We are completely committed to protecting the security of the ballot box and the integrity of every legal vote. This means ensuring accountability for anyone committing election crimes.”

Paxton’s office did not reply to a request for additional information. His announcement did not detail the targets of the raids, the number of raids, or the reason specific homes were searched.

“It’s still very vague,” Rosales said in an interview. “That’s what’s really unnerving about the whole situation.”

According to one person whose home was raided, Rosales said, law enforcement suggested that he was accused of possessing “illegal voter information” — a claim that he denied and called politically motivated, saying voter information is publicly available.

“There’s no there, there,” Rosales said. “They’re using every tool in the toolbox to intimidate our people from coming out to the polls.”

The Texas Tribune

Rosales said he was working with the group’s national leaders and attorneys to draft a formal complaint with the U.S. Justice Department requesting a federal investigation into Paxton’s raids.

The attorney general’s office was asked to investigate the allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting during the 2022 elections by 81st Judicial District Attorney Audrey Louis, a Republican whose district includes Frio and Atascosa counties.

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===

guard

one of the United States’ oldest Latino civil rights organizations is raising alarm after several of its members had their homes raided as part of a voter fraud investigation by the Texas attorney general’s office.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (Lulac) wants the Department of Justice to investigate raids on at least three of its members in Texas. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said in a statement last week his office had executed multiple search warrants in Bexar county, which includes San Antonio, as well as neighboring Frio and Atascosa counties as part of an ongoing, two-year investigation. The office did not provide details of the investigation or respond to a request for comment.

No one has been arrested and the exact nature of the investigation remains unclear. But the searches themselves were designed to intimidate, Lulac officials said.

‘A different level than 2020’: Trump’s plan to steal election is taking shape

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/12/trump-overturn-result-presidential-election-vote)

“They’re trying to intimidate our folks that are out registering people,” said Lulac’s president, Roman Palomares. “What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to intimidate, and then that has repercussions down the line here, where folks read about that and they go, ‘God, I mean, if they’re doing that to her and I’m a registrar, God, how are they going to go after me?’”

A justice department spokesperson said the agency was aware of the matter and declined to comment further.

Lidia Martinez, 87, said nine officers from the attorney general’s office showed up at her front door at 6am last Tuesday and spent hours searching her home as she watched in her nightgown. She said they told her they were there because she had filed a complaint that senior citizens were not receiving their ballots.

Martinez was taken outside in front of her neighbors while officers searched the house, she said. Eventually, the officers left with her laptop, planner and cellphone.

View image in fullscreen

Lidia Martinez, center, a volunteer and great-grandmother whose home was searched, center, speaks at a news conference for Lulac on Monday. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP

“I asked them why are you all doing this? And he said because there was fraud,” she said. “I said I’m not doing anything illegal. All I do is help the seniors.”

Texas has extremely strict rules around mail-in balloting. Only those who are sick, out of the county on election day, confined in jail, giving birth within three weeks of election day, or aged 65 and older are authorized to request a mail-in ballot. Anyone who assists someone in requesting a ballot must fill out a form indicating they assisted. Anyone who assists the voter in returning the actual ballot, other than a family or household member, must sign the envelope with the ballot noting their assistance.

Texas leans on new voting law to reject thousands of ballot applications

pennsylvania man charged with voter fraud after voting under his dead mom's name. Take a wild guess who he voted for

Meaghan Ellis

December 22, 2020

For several weeks now, President Donald Trump has been circulating baseless claims of widespread voter fraud simply because he lost the election. From Dominion Voting Systems conspiracies to claims about mysterious ballot dumps and dead people voting,

watkins KS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/a-republican-congressman-just-got-charged-with-3-felonies-including-voter-fraud

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/something-really-rotten-heres-the-evidence-of-extensive-voter-suppression-in-georgias-notorious-2018-election/

voter suppression 2102

blog 5th col

alec disband task force (which and why?) stand your ground

VOTER FRAUD

Conservative Group With Abramoff Scandal Ties Picks Up Voter ID Issue Where ALEC Left Off

April 20, 2012 kstreet607

One has to wonder, why the GOP think that they will truly suppress tens of thousands of voters without a valid ID from casting their ballots on election day. If their strategy was to make sure those tens of thousands don’t vote, activists and civil rights advocates are making an effort to help voters with the process of obtaining an ID before election day.

In the meantime, some of us sit and watch this attack on democracy try to take hold, but I am certain those leading the effort to retain our democratic principles will eventually rule the day. I intend to do my part

Shortly after the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) announced it was dropping voter identification laws from its agenda, another conservative group is stepping in to fill the void.

The National Center for Public Policy Research announced this week it had formed a “Voter Identification Task Force” to continue ALEC’s “excellent work” in “promoting measures to enhance integrity in voting.” Describing itself as a “conservative, free-market, non-profit think-tank,” the group was established in 1982.

“The fact that ALEC is no longer going to be offering the services it did got us interested in doing something,” National Center for Public Policy Research executive director David Almasi told TPM. “We obviously can’t do everything ALEC did, but we can do something to make sure the issue doesn’t go away.”

“This is something that we picked up because someone else dropped it and not because anyone has come to us and said here’s a check, do it. It’s something that we feel strongly enough about that we’re willing to do it off our regular strategic plan,” Almasi said.

“We’re putting the left on notice: you take out a conservative program operating in one area, we’ll kick it up a notch somewhere else,” Amy Ridenour, chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research, said in a statement. “You will not win. We outnumber you and we outthink you, and when you kick up a fuss you inspire us to victory.”

Corporate CEOs who “cower in the face of liberal boycott threats need to understand that the left never gives up,” Ridenour said. “If these corporations do not reverse course and immediately grow enough of a backbone to say no when the left tells them what to do, conservatives may as well consider them part of the organized left. It doesn’t matter if corporate executives have free-market sentiments hidden deep inside them if they continually surrender to theleft’s Trotskyite strategy of making relentless demand after demand in public.”

While several conservative organizations have taken up the issue of voter identification, no national group that considered voter ID their central issue has existed since the American Center for Voting Rights disappeared back in 2007. More recently, the Tea Party group True the Vote has held a national conference to address the issue and James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has produced a number of “undercover” videos in an attempt to show why they believe voter ID laws are necessary.

The NCPPR got a bit tangled up in the Jack Abramoff scandal a few years back. The Center for Media and Democracy points out that a Senate investigation found that Ridenour directed money received by the NCPPR at Abramoff’s direction. The group reportedly covered the cost of several of former Rep. Tom Delay’s overseas junkets. Nobody from the group faced charges.

ALEC eliminates task force on social issues (rawstory.com)
ALEC Disbands Task Force Responsible for Voter ID, ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
LETTER TO THE EDITOR | Voter ID would help legitimize elections (kitsapsun.com)
Voter Suppression 101 (thefifthcolumn2.wordpress.com)
ALEC Disbands Task Force Responsible for Voter ID, ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws (the2012scenario.com)
===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/probe-of-missing-georgia-votes-finds-extreme-irregularities-in-black-districts/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-voting-wars-come-to-campus/

no lnx

The voting wars come to campus

Written by Daniel Block / Washington Monthly August 27, 2019

Texas: home of corn dogs, Matthew McConaughey, and some of America’s most restrictive voting laws. To register yourself, you have to print out a form and deliver it to the county clerk, because unlike most states, Texashas no online voter registration. To help register others, you must be certified as a “volunteer deputy registrar,” a process that requires either taking an exam or attending an often long and awkwardly timed training session. Your certificate is only valid in the county where it is obtained.

The state has also made it harder to cast a ballot. Between 2013 and 2016, Texas eliminated more than 400 polling locations, the largest drop in any state during that time. In 2013, after years of litigation, it implemented a strict voter ID law. The law, which lists seven kinds of acceptable IDs, became infamous for its brazenly partisan implications—handgun licenses are okay, for example, while student IDs are not.

All of which makes the following statistic so surprising: at the University of Texas at Austin, the state’s flagship university, undergraduate turnout increased from almost 39 percent to 53 percent between 2012 and 2016. Over that same time period, national youth turnout stayed roughly constant. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University, which calculates campus voting rates, has not yet released numbers for last year’s midterms. But at UT Austin’s on-campus polling locations, the number of early ballots cast was more than three times higher than it was in 2014. (Travis County only provides polling site specific data for early voting.)

The state of Texas is not alone in seeming to apply tougher voting rules to college students, who as a group are more left leaning than the overall electorate. In New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Arizona—all presidential battlegrounds—Republican-controlled legislatures have created particular obstacles for college voters. And yet, in the midst of this clampdown, there are clear signs that students and schools are surmounting voting barriers and countering their impact—and not just in Texas. At Arizona State University in Tempe, for example, despite a restrictive voter ID law and new limits on mail-in ballot collection, student voting rates went up by double digits between 2012 and 2016.

That’s because at institutions like UT Austin and ASU Tempe, students and staff work to make registering and voting as easy as possible, even as Texas and Arizona have made it harder. They find new, creative ways of registering students. They explain complex voting requirements. They work with local officials to increase polling access on campus. In doing so, they are supported by a growing network of national organizations that provide funding, share information, and help schools develop plans to simplify getting out the vote. (The Washington Monthly incorporates data from these organizations in its college rankings. Both UT Austin and ASU Tempe received perfect scores.)

These efforts appear to be making a difference. Nationwide, college voting rates increased by more than three percentage points between 2012 and 2016, more than the overall turnout increase. Between 2014 and 2018, youth turnout rose by nearly a third.

In an era of high partisanship and close contests, student voting can make a tremendous impact. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won her U.S. Senate seat by 55,900 votes, roughly the size of ASU Tempe’s student population. In Texas, youth turnout tripled between 2014 and 2018, and Democrat Beto O’Rourke overperformed in counties with a high percentage of young voters. That means that UT Austin was at the vanguard of a trend that helped bring O’Rourke surprisingly close to unseating Ted Cruz from the U.S. Senate.

The increase in student voting is counterintuitive, but it fits a broader pattern. Even as franchise restrictions target certain communities, political scientists have found that they do not usually result in lower proportional turnout. There is little evidence that voter ID laws have led to markedly less voting among racial minorities, even though minorities are far less likely than white people to possess the kinds of identification these laws require. Researchers aren’t quite sure why. But several have suggested that the reason is counter-mobilization: the harder a state works to suppress turnout, the harder people fight back....

5/19

Number of other Southern states where Republican politicians have also targeted alleged non-citizen voters using flawed methods: 2*

* Florida and North Carolina.

fac so

Southern legislatures take aim at direct democracy

After voters approved a constitutional amendment restoring the franchise to people with felony convictions, Florida lawmakers are trying to make it harder for citizens to put amendments on the ballot. Legislators in Arkansas, the only other Southern state that allows citizen-initiated amendments, did likewise after voters passed a minimum-wage hike.

[also have to pay any fees/fines to get vote back

AL-Sen: On Thursday, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill publicly expressed interest in seeking the GOP nod to challenge Democratic Sen. Doug Jones and said he was looking to decide around Memorial Day. Merrill has served as Alabama's chief elections officer since 2015, and he's been a strong proponent of its strict voter ID laws while minimizing their consequences.

In 2015, Merrill defended then-Gov. Robert Bentley's decision to close 31 driver's license offices, many located in predominantly black counties, by insisting that the move wouldn't make it harder to black citizens to register to vote. Bentley and his allies argued this was merely a cost-saving move and had no other intent. However, an investigation from the U.S. Department of Transportation concluded that this very much caused "a disparate and adverse impact on the basis of race." Those cost savings also reportedly amounted to no more than $300,000, money that was almost certainly lost in the legal battles over the policy.

Unfortunately, Merrill has not gotten any better over the years. In 2016, he blasted the idea of automatic voter registration declaring, "If you're too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and to go register to vote, or to register electronically, and then to go vote, then you don't deserve that privilege."

Merrill even invoked the civil rights movement as his justification. After describing how people fought and died "because of their desire to ensure that everybody that wanted to had the right to register to vote and participate in the process," Merrill insisted "I'm not going to cheapen the work that they did." He went on to say, "I'm not going to embarrass them by allowing somebody that's too sorry to get up off of their rear end to go register to vote?or now, because of what we've done, turn the computer on and register to vote?because they think they deserve the right because they've turned 18."...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/republican-states-go-all-in-on-voter-suppression-in-response-to-2018-blue-wave/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=108&recip_id=21989&list_id=2

wilbur ross subpoena? house testify on census cit question

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/these-laws-are-chipping-away-at-democracy-around-the-world/

hmmn, maybe miscat? more active suppr

Chrystie Flournoy Swiney,

Democracy seemed ascendant after the rivalry between communist and democratic states subsided in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. As elected governments replaced many toppled totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, the number of democracies rose.

Yet with rare exceptions, authoritarian leadership and other undemocratic governments have been the norm throughout human history. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that democracy seems to be losing ground after its post-1991 surge. The rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald Trump in the U.S. are among the most visible examples.

As a human rights attorney completing my Ph.D. in international relations, I’m researching why democracy appears to be declining around the globe. In addition to the growing number of far-right, authoritarian-leaning leaders who certainly bear responsibility,lawmakers in historically strong democracies are proposing and passing legislation that adds new layers of red tape, restricts access to foreign financial support, and makes it harder and riskier to engage in peaceful protests.

From India to Poland to Israel, legislators are limiting the freedom of independent nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations. Many of these groups are responsible for holding governments to account, standing up for minority rights and providing services to the indigent, among other critical roles.

New restrictions

My research focuses on the spread of undemocratic civil society laws in historically democratic states. These laws include bills that impose new restrictions on forming, operating and funding civil society organizations. They are limiting the activities of charities, watchdog organizations, protest movements and nonprofit service providers, such as health care clinics depended on by people lacking access to affordable health care.

For nearly a decade I’ve tracked and documented the spread of these laws. By my count, at least 58 percent of the world’s strongest democracies have adopted at least one restrictive civil society law since 1990. Counting proposed laws, another 5 percent are in this growing category.

I’m not talking about similar legislation passed in non-democratic and weakly democratic states like Russia, Egypt and Turkey. These laws are also problematic and troublesome for global civil society, but are not the primary focus of my research.

Consider what happened after Russia enacted a law in 2012 that requires all nonprofits wishing to receive any amount of foreign donations and that are engaged in what the government defines as political activities to register as “foreign agents” – a toxic term in the Russian context.

Since then, elected politicians have passed measures with similar objectives in countries with democratic governments, including Israel, India, Austria, Hungary and Poland.

In trouble

Democracy experts like the independent watchdog Freedom House generally agree that democracy is in trouble around the world. They no longer debate whether democracy is imperiled, but by how much and whether it’s reversible.

Democracy scholars, such as William Galston at the Brookings Institution – a centrist think tank, political scientist Yascha Mounk and columnists like Nicholas Kristof tend to focus on the rise of populist and far-right leaders when explaining global democratic decay.

But in democracies, the law, not the president or prime minister, is critical to maintaining the pillars and foundations upon which democracy rests. That is why I consider an Austrian law that curbs access to foreign funding to all Muslim organizations so troubling.

I’m also concerned about a Polish law that consolidates all power over nongovernmental organization funding, whether foreign or domestic, into the hands of a single individual appointed by its prime minister. And I find a Hungarian law, which requires nongovernmental organizations that get more than $28,000 of their funds from other countries to label themselves as funded from abroad on all of their publications, worrisome.

When laws are passed that undermine democracy’s critical foundations, democracy weakens. Laws restricting the independence and strength of nonprofits are one example of this.

[dynamic list ]

United States

Restrictive laws are even appearing here in the United States, so far only at the state rather than the federal level – aside from a handful of obscure measures. These laws are designed to curb what nonprofits and activists can do.

For example, over the past decade, more than half of all states have introduced so-called“ag-gag laws,” measures designed to silence whistleblowers who reveal animal abuses on industrial farms. However, the U.S. system of checks and balances is slowing and reversing their impact. American courts are finding many of these laws to be in violation of the Constitution.

At the same time, ag-gag laws remain on the books in at least seven states.

[map]

Initiatives at the state and federal level since November 2016 that aim to restrict the rights of Americans to protest are all over the map.

International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), CC BY-SA

Similarly, since November 2016, legislators in 35 states have considered more than 91 bills designed to restrict protest activities. For example, a growing number of states, including Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio and Washington have introduced harsh new criminal penalties for protesters who wear hooded jackets or otherwise disguise their identities while protesting. What’s more, states, including Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina and Texas, have proposed laws shielding motorists from liability if they end up injuring or killing protesters who block traffic.

Few of these anti-protest measures, only 11 of 91 considered, have been enacted. Legal challenges could topple many if not all of them. But these measures do, in my view, have the potential to erode American democracy.

Chrystie Flournoy Swiney, Doctoral Fellow at Georgetown and Human Rights Attorney, Georgetown University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

wow hope?

Controversy

Schuette was working to strike down a ballot initiative to eliminate partisan gerrymandering, which has gained enough signatures to be on the Michigan ballot in the November 2018 election.^[42] The issue went on to the state supreme court, where "Five of the seven justices were nominated or appointed by Republicans, and two of those have received financial backing from the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which also happens to be one of the main funders of the opposition campaign. Both justices have refused to recuse themselves from the case."^[42] The court upheld the inclusion of the initiative on the ballot which was approved by voters.^[43]

blow to 'usurper' elected officials in North Carolina

A state judge recently struck down a voter ID amendment to the N.C. Constitution because the legislators who ratified it were elected in unconstitutional, racially gerrymandered districts. Meanwhile, two white sheriffs who ousted black sheriffs with the help of a suspected election fraudster are also facing legal problems. (3/12/2019)

Actual election fraud may have taken place in this North Carolina race — but it looks like it helped the Republican

There is a possibility the 9th Congressional District results will simply be thrown out and the election redone.

Friday, the North Carolina Bipartisan State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement voted 7-2 to hold a hearing before December 21 over the allegations of election fraud in the race for the 9th Congressional District. This follows the unanimous vote of every Democrat and Republican on the board to refuse to certify the results earlier this week.

Republican Mark Harris defeated Democrat Dan McCready by a razor-thin margin of 905 votes. But the result has been marred by reports of irregularities with absentee ballots in Bladen County.

Democratic attorneys presented multiple sworn affidavits to the Board of Elections from voters, including elderly African-Americans, who reported a young woman unexpectedly arriving at their house to take their ballots, in one case even saying she would fill in votes for offices that were left blank. Another voter reported seeing unauthorized people running election results after the polls closed, while yet another alleged to have overheard people saying thatLeslie McCrae Dowless, Jr., a local political operative working with Harris' campaign on absentee ballots, would be paid a $40,000 bonus if Harris won the election.

On top of it all, the absentee ballot numbers in Bladen County are bizarre, with far more unreturned ballots than in any other county in the district, and with the Republican winning these ballots by 61 to 38 even though registered Democrats led Republicans in accepted absentee ballots by 42 to 19.

Taken together, it is unclear whether any of this was decisive in Harris winning the election, but the irregularities are serious enough that the Board of Elections cannot certify the results.

In the greatest twist of irony, Republicans in North Carolina have long used the specter of "voter fraud" to enact draconian identification laws that disproportionately impact people of color. The type of fraud they claim these laws fight — people showing up in person at polling places to cast multiple ballots — virtually never happens. Now, one of the most significant potential cases of fraud in the state appears to have been perpetrated to favor the Republican candidate — and no voter ID law would have prevented it.

This House race was one of the most closely-watched in the country. Harris, a controversial Baptist pastor from Charlotte who led the charge to legislate discrimination of trans people in public restrooms, has argued women should submit to their husbands, and thinks homosexuality should be criminalized. Earlier this year, he shocked observers when he unseated incumbent GOP Rep. Robert Pittenger in his primary. Though the 9th District is very conservative, Harris' liabilities as a candidate made it a close race against McCready, a Marine veteran and green energy investor.

It is unclear what happens now. Harris, who was already setting up shop in D.C., is now in a legal limbo that could prevent him from being seated in Congress. Ultimately, the Board of Elections could end up certifying the results after their investigation, or they could throw out the election entirely and do it over. Meanwhile, North Carolina Republicans are threatening to sue to force the election to be certified as is. And as if all of that were not enough, a bill passed by Republicans in the state legislature made partisan changes to the Board of Elections that will dissolve the current membership in a few weeks, creating the potential that their replacements will overturn all of this.

There is no telling what the end result of this process will be. But the whole affair is a test to the integrity of the democratic process — and to people's faith in it.

nader show 10/29/18

ballot access news richard ------

TR, Debs blacked

Hundreds of Thousands of Wisconsin Voters Purged from Rolls Since 2016 General Election

By ExposedByCMD Editors — The Center for Media and Democracy finds that almost 700,000 Wisconsin voters have been removed from the voter rolls since the end of December 2016.

The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act

In The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act, author Keith Gaddiereveals the history behind the Voting Rights Act, its impact on the United States, and the consequences that follow.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?441314-1/the-rise-fall-voting-rights-act

AN 818

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As you probably know, the myth of widespread in-person voter fraud is just a thin premise Republicans embrace in order to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Back in 2016, researchers at UC San Diego found that strict voter ID laws "cause a reduction in Democratic turnout by 8.8 percentage points, compared to a reduction of 3.6 percentage points for Republicans." That 5.2 percentage point margin wins them elections without having to come up with a popular agenda.

Here's a new twist on that old story. "A new study estimates that approximately 78,000 transgender people in eight crucial states will be eligible to vote in the upcoming 2018 elections, but will be unable to do so, due to those states’ excessively strict voter ID laws," according to DC's *Metro Weekly*.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/kris-kobach-voter-fraud-kansas-trial

In the end, the decision seemed inevitable. After a seven-day trial in Kansas City federal court in March, in which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach needed to be tutored on basic trial procedure by the judge and was found in contempt for his “willful failure” to obey a ruling, even he knew his chances were slim. Kobach told The Kansas City Star at the time that he expected the judge would rule against him (though he expressed optimism in his chances on appeal).

Sure enough, yesterday federal Judge Julie Robinson overturned the law that Kobach was defending as lead counsel for the state, dealing him an unalloyed defeat. The statute, championed by Kobach and signed into law in 2013, required Kansans to present proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, contending that the law violated the National Voter Registration Act (AKA the “motor voter” law), which was designed to make it easy to register.

The trial had a significance that extends far beyond the Jayhawk state. One of the fundamental questions in the debate over alleged voter fraud — whether a substantial number of non-citizens are in fact registering to vote — was one of two issues to be determined in the Kansas proceedings. (The second was whether there was a less burdensome solution than what Kansas had adopted.) That made the trial a telling opportunity to remove the voter fraud claims from the charged, and largely proof-free, realms of political campaigns and cable news shoutfests and examine them under the exacting strictures of the rules of evidence.

That’s precisely what occurred and according to Robinson, an appointee of George W. Bush, the proof that voter fraud is widespread was utterly lacking. As the judge put it, “the court finds no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote” even under the previous law, which Kobach had claimed was weak.

Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission Is Gone, But Scrutiny Will Continue

The president dissolved the commission and indicated that the Department of Homeland Security will continue its mission. Experts say DHS won’t achieve the results he wants — and critics won’t back down.

A Short History of the Brief and Bumpy Life of the Voting Fraud Commission

It never made it to its third meeting, but the friction — and the lawsuits — live on.

For Kobach, the trial should’ve been a moment of glory. He’s been arguing for a decade that voter fraud is a national calamity. Much of his career has been built on this issue, along with his fervent opposition to illegal immigration. (His claim is that unlawful immigrants are precisely the ones voting illegally.) Kobach, who also co-chaired the Trump administration’s short-lived commission on voter fraud, is perhaps the individual most identified with the cause of sniffing out and eradicating phony voter registration. He’s got a gilded resume, with degrees from Harvard University, Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, and is seen as both the intellect behind the cause and its prime advocate. Kobach has written voter laws in other jurisdictions and defended them in court. If anybody ever had time to marshal facts and arguments before a trial, it was Kobach.

But things didn’t go well for him in the Kansas City courtroom, as Robinson’s opinion made clear. Kobach’s strongest evidence of non-citizen registration was anemic at best: Over a 20-year period, fewer than 40 non-citizens had attempted to register in one Kansas county that had 130,000 voters. Most of those 40 improper registrations were the result of mistakes or confusion rather than intentional attempts to mislead, and only five of the 40 managed to cast a vote.

One of Kobach’s own experts even rebutted arguments made by both Kobach and President Donald Trump. The expert testified that a handful of improper registrations could not be extrapolated to conclude that 2.8 million fraudulent votes — roughly, the gap between Hillary Clinton and Trump in the popular vote tally — had been cast in the 2016 presidential election. Testimony from a second key expert for Kobach also fizzled.

As the judge’s opinion noted, Kobach insisted the meager instances of cheating revealed at trial are just “the tip of the iceberg.” As she explained, “This trial was his opportunity to produce credible evidence of that iceberg, but he failed to do so.” Dismissing the testimony by Kobach’s witnesses as unpersuasive, Robinson drew what she called “the more obvious conclusion that there is no iceberg; only an icicle largely created by confusion and administrative error.”

By the time the trial was over, Kobach, a charismatic 52-year-old whose broad shoulders and imposing height make him resemble an aging quarterback, seemed to have shrunk inside his chair at the defense table.

But despite his defeat, Kobach’s causes — restricting immigration and tightening voting requirements — seem to be enjoying favorable tides elsewhere. Recent press accounts noted Kobach’s role in restoring a question about citizenship, abandoned since 1950, to U.S. Census forms for 2020. And the Supreme Court ruled on June 11 that the state of Ohio can purge voters from its rolls when they fail to vote even a single time and don’t return a mailing verifying their address, a provision that means more voters will need to re-register and prove their eligibility again.

For his own part, Kobach is now a candidate for governor of Kansas, running neck and neck with the incumbent in polls for the Republican primary on Aug. 7.It’s not clear whether the verdict will affect his chances — or whether it will lead him and others to quietly retreat from claims of voter fraud. But the judge’s opinion and expert interviews reveal that Kobach effectively put the concept of mass voter fraud to the test — and the evidence crumbled.

Perhaps it was an omen. Before Kobach could enter the courtroom inside the Robert J. Dole U.S. Courthouse each day, he had to pass through a hallway whose walls featured a celebratory display entitled “Americans by Choice: The Story of Immigration and Citizenship in Kansas.” Photographs of people who’d been sworn in as citizens in that very courthouse were superimposed on the translucent window shades.

Public interest in the trial was high. The seating area quickly filled to capacity on the first day of trial on the frigid morning of March 6. The jury box was opened to spectators; it wouldn’t be needed, as this was a bench trial. Those who couldn’t squeeze in were sent to a lower floor, where a live feed had been prepared in a spillover room.

From the moment the trial opened, Kobach and his co-counsels in the Kansas secretary of state’s office, Sue Becker and Garrett Roe, stumbled over the most basic trial procedures. Their mistakes antagonized the judge. “Evidence 101,” Robinson snapped, only minutes into the day, after Kobach’s team attempted to improperly introduce evidence. “I’m not going to do it.”

Matters didn’t improve for Kobach from there.

Throughout the trial, his team’s repeated mishaps and botched cross examinations cost hours of the court’s time. Robinson was repeatedly forced to step into the role of law professor, guiding Kobach, Becker and Roe through courtroom procedure. “Do you know how to do the next step, if that’s what you’re going to do?” the judge asked Becker at one point, as she helped her through the steps of impeaching a witness. “We’re going to follow the rules of evidence here.”

Becker often seemed nervous. She took her bright red glasses off and on. At times she burst into nervous chuckles after a misstep. She laughed at witnesses, skirmished with the judge and even taunted the lawyers for the ACLU. “I can’t wait to ask my questions on Monday!” she shouted at the end of the first week, jabbing a finger in the direction of Dale Ho, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. Ho rolled his eyes.

Roe was gentler — deferential, even. He often admitted he didn’t know what step came next, asking the judge for help. “I don’t — I don’t know if this one is objectionable. I hope it’s not,” he offered at one point, as he prepared to ask a question following a torrent of sustained objections. “I’ll let you know,” an attorney for the plaintiffs responded, to a wave of giggles in the courtroom. On the final day of trial, as Becker engaged in yet another dispute with the judge, Roe slapped a binder to his forehead and audibly whispered, “Stop talking. Stop talking.”

Kobach’s cross examinations were smoother and better organized, but he regularly attempted to introduce exhibits — for example, updated state statistics that he had failed to provide the ACLU in advance to vet — that Robinson ruled were inadmissible. As the trial wore on, she became increasingly irritated. She implored Kobach to “please read” the rules on which she based her rulings, saying his team had repeated these errors “ad nauseum.”

Kobach seemed unruffled. Instead of heeding her advice, he’d proffer the evidence for the record, a practice that allows the evidence to be preserved for appeal even if the trial judge refuses to admit it. Over the course of the trial, Kobach and his team would do this nearly a dozen times.

Eventually, Robinson got fed up. She asked Kobach to justify his use of proffers. Kobach, seemingly alarmed, grabbed a copy of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — to which he had attached a growing number of Post-it notes — and quickly flipped through it, trying to find the relevant rule.

The judge tried to help. “It’s Rule 26, of course, that’s been the basis for my rulings,” she told Kobach. “I think it would be helpful if you would just articulate under what provision of Rule 26 you think this is permissible.” Kobach seemed to play for time, asking clarifying questions rather than articulating a rationale. Finally, the judge offered mercy: a 15-minute break. Kobach’s team rushed from the courtroom.

...

It wasn’t enough to save him. In her opinion, Robinson described “a pattern and practice by Defendant [Kobach] of flaunting disclosure and discovery rules.” As she put it, “it is not clear to the Court whether Defendant repeatedly failed to meet his disclosure obligations intentionally or due to his unfamiliarity with the federal rules.” She ordered Kobach to attend the equivalent of after-school tutoring: six hours of extra legal education on the rules of civil procedure or the rules of evidence (and to present the court with a certificate of completion).

It’s always a bad idea for a lawyer to try the patience of a judge — and that’s doubly true during a bench trial, when the judge will decide not only the law, but also the facts. Kobach repeatedly annoyed Robinson with his procedural mistakes. But that was nothing next to what the judge viewed as Kobach’s intentional bad faith.

This view emerged in writing right after the trial — that’s when Robinson issued her ruling finding Kobach in contempt — but before the verdict. And the conduct that inspired the contempt finding had persisted over several years. Robinson concluded that Kobach had intentionally failed to follow a ruling she issued in 2016 that ordered him to restore the privileges of 17,000 suspended Kansas voters.

In her contempt ruling, the judge cited Kobach’s “history of noncompliance” with the order and characterized his explanations for not abiding by it as “nonsensical” and “disingenuous.” She wrote that she was “troubled” by Kobach’s “failure to take responsibility for violating this Court’s orders, and for failing to ensure compliance over an issue that he explicitly represented to the Court had been accomplished.” Robinson ordered Kobach to pay the ACLU’s legal fees for the contempt proceeding.

That contempt ruling was actually the second time Kobach was singled out for punishment in the case. Before the trial, a federal magistrate judge deputized to oversee the discovery portion of the suit fined him $1,000 for making “patently misleading representations” about a voting fraud document Kobach had prepared for Trump. Kobachpaid the fine with a state credit card.

More than any procedural bumbling, the collapse of Kobach’s case traced back to the disintegration of a single witness.

The witness was Jesse Richman, a political scientist from Old Dominion University, who has written studies on voter fraud. For this trial, Richman was paid $5,000 by the taxpayers of Kansas to measure non-citizen registration in the state. Richman was the man who had to deliver the goods for Kobach.

With his gray-flecked beard and mustache, Richman looked the part of an academic, albeit one who seemed a bit too tall for his suit and who showed his discomfort in a series of awkward, sudden movements on the witness stand. At moments, Richman’s testimony turned combative, devolving into something resembling an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. By the time he left the stand, Richman had testified for more than five punishing hours. He’d bickered with the ACLU’s lawyer, raised his voice as he defended his studies and repeatedly sparred with the judge.

“Wait, wait, wait!” shouted Robinson at one point, silencing a verbal free-for-all that had erupted among Richman, the ACLU’s Ho, and Kobach, who were all speaking at the same time. “Especially you,” she said, turning her stare to Richman. “You are not here to be an advocate. You are not here to trash the plaintiff. And you are not here to argue with me.”

Richman had played a small but significant part in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump and others had cited his work to claim that illegal votes had robbed Trump of the popular vote. At an October 2016 rally in Wisconsin, the candidate cited Richman’s work to bolster his predictions that the election would be rigged. “You don’t read about this, right?” Trump told the crowd, before reading from an op-ed Richman had written for The Washington Post: “‘We find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in various close elections.’ Okay? All right?”

Richman’s 2014 study of non-citizen registration used data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — an online survey of more than 32,000 people. Of those, fewer than 40 individuals indicated they were non-citizens registered to vote. Based on that sample, Richman concluded that up to 2.8 million illegal votes had been cast in 2008 by non-citizens. In fact, he put the illegal votes at somewhere between 38,000 and 2.8 million — a preposterously large range — and then Trump and others simply used the highest figure.

Academics pilloried Richman’s conclusions. Two hundred political scientists signed an open letter criticizing the study, saying it should “not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting.” Harvard’s Stephen Ansolabehere, who administered the CCES, published his own peer-reviewed paper lambasting Richman’s work. Indeed, by the time Trump read Richman’s article onstage in 2016, The Washington Post had already appended a note to the op-ed linking to three rebuttals and a peer-reviewed study debunking the research.

None of that discouraged Kobach or Trump from repeating Richman’s conclusions. They then went a few steps further. They took the top end of the range for the 2008 election, assumed that it applied to the 2016 election, too, and further assumed that all of the fraudulent ballots had been cast for Clinton.

Some of those statements found their way into the courtroom, when Ho pressed play on a video shot by The Kansas City Star on Nov. 30, 2016. Kobach had met with Trump 10 days earlier and had brought with him a paper decrying non-citizen registration and voter fraud. Two days later, Trump tweeted that he would have won the popular vote if not for “millions of people who voted illegally.”

...

no lnx

On the courtroom’s televisions,Kobach appeared, saying Trump’s tweet was “absolutely correct.” Without naming Richman, Kobach referred to his study: The number of non-citizens who said they’d voted in 2008 was far larger than the popular vote margin, Kobach said on the video. The same number likely voted again in 2016.

In the courtroom, Ho asked Richman if he believed his research supported such a claim. Richman stammered. He repeatedly looked at Kobach, seemingly searching for a way out. Ho persisted and finally, Richman gave his answer: “I do not believe my study provides strong support for that notion.”

To estimate the number of non-citizens voting in Kansas, Richman had used the same methodology he employed in his much-criticized 2014 study. Using samples as small as a single voter, he’d produced surveys with wildly different estimates of non-citizen registration in the state. The multiple iterations confused everyone in the courtroom.

“For the record, how many different data sources have you provided?” Robinson interjected in the middle of one Richman answer. “You provide a range of, like, zero to 18,000 or more.”

“I sense the frustration,” Richman responded, before offering a winding explanation of the multiple data sources and surveys he’d used to arrive at a half-dozen different estimates. Robinson cut him off. “Maybe we need to stop here,” she said.

“Your honor, let me finish answering your question,” he said.

“No, no. I’m done,” she responded, as he continued to protest. “No. Dr. Richman, I’m done.”

To refute Richman’s numbers, the ACLU called on Harvard’s Ansolabehere, whose data Richman had relied on in the past. Ansolabehere testified that Richman’s sample sizes were so small that it was just as possible that there were no non-citizens registered to vote in Kansas as 18,000. “There’s just a great deal of uncertainty with these estimates,” he said.

Ho asked if it would be accurate to say that Richman’s data “shows a rate of non-citizen registration in Kansas that is not statistically distinct from zero?”

“Correct.”

The judge was harsher than Ansolabehere in her description of Richman’s testimony. In her opinion, Robinson unloaded a fusillade of dismissive adjectives, calling Richman’s conclusions “confusing, inconsistent and methodologically flawed,” and adding that they were “credibly dismantled” by Ansolabehere. She labeled elements of Richman’s testimony “disingenuous” and “misleading,” and stated that she gave his research “no weight” in her decision.

One of the paradoxes of Kobach is that he has become a star in circles that focus on illegal immigration and voting fraud despite poor results in the courtroom. By ProPublica’s count, Kobach chalked up a 2–6 won-lost record in federal cases in which he was played a major role, and which reached a final disposition before the Kansas case.

Those results occurred when Kobach was an attorney for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform from 2004 to 2011, when he became secretary of state in Kansas. In his FAIR role (in which he continued to moonlight till about 2014), Kobach traveled to places like Fremont, Nebraska, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Farmers Branch, Texas, and Valley Park, Missouri, to help local governments write laws that attempted to hamper illegal immigration, and then defend them in court. Kobach won in Nebraska, but lost in Texas and Pennsylvania, and only a watered down version of the law remains in Missouri.

The best-known law that Kobach helped shape before joining the Kansas government in 2011 was Arizona’s “show me your papers” law. That statute allowed police to demand citizenship documents for any reason from anyone they thought might be in the country illegally. After it passed, the state paid Kobach $300 an hour to train law enforcement on how to legally arrest suspected illegal immigrants. The Supreme Court gutted key provisions of the law in 2012.

Kobach also struggled in two forays into political campaigning. In 2004, he lost a race for Congress. He also drew criticism for his stint as an informal adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Kobach was the man responsible for Romney’s much-maligned proposal that illegal immigrants “self-deport,” one reason Romney attracted little support among Latinos. Romney disavowed Kobach even before the campaign was over, telling media outlets that he was a “supporter,” not an adviser.

Trump’s election meant Kobach’s positions on immigration would be welcome in the White House. Kobach lobbied for, but didn’t receive, an appointment as Secretary of Homeland Security. He was, however, placed in charge of the voter fraud commission, a pet project of Trump’s. Facing a raft of lawsuits and bad publicity, the commission was disbanded little more than six months after it formally launched.

Back at home, Kobach expanded his power as secretary of state. Boasting of his experience as a law professor and scholar, Kobach convinced the state legislature to give him the authority to prosecute election crimes himself, a power wielded by no other secretary of state.In that role, he has obtained nine guilty pleas against individuals for election-related misdemeanors. Only one of those who pleaded guilty, as it happens, was a non-citizen.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signs a bill granting prosecuting power to the secretary of state for cases of voter fraud in Topeka, Kansas, on June 8, 2015, as Kris Kobach, back center, looks on. (Chris Neal/The Topeka Capital-Journal via AP)

He also persuaded Kansas’ attorney general to allow Kobach to represent the state in the trial of Kansas’ voting law. Kobach argued it was a bargain. As he told The Wichita Eagle at the time, “The advantage is the state gets an experienced appellate litigator who is a specialist in this field and in constitutional law for the cost the state is already paying, which is my salary.”

Kobach fared no better in the second main area of the Kansas City trial than he had in the first. This part explored whether there is a less burdensome way of identifying non-citizens than forcing everyone to show proof of citizenship upon registration. Judge Robinson would conclude that there were many alternatives that were less intrusive.

In his opening, Ho of the ACLU spotlighted a potentially less intrusive approach. Why not use the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements System list, and compare the names on it to the Kansas voter rolls? That, Ho argued, could efficiently suss out illegal registrations.

Kobach told the judge that simply wasn’t feasible. The list, he explained, doesn’t contain all non-citizens in the country illegally — it contains only non-citizens legally present and those here illegally who register in some way with the federal government. Plus, he told Robinson, in order to really match the SAVE list against a voter roll, both datasets would have to contain alien registration numbers, the identifier given to non-citizens living in the U.S. “Those are things that a voter registration system doesn’t have,” he said. “So, the SAVE system does not work.”

But Kobach had made the opposite argument when he headed the voter fraud commission. There, he’d repeatedly advocated the use of the SAVE database. Appearing on Fox News in May 2017, shortly after the commission was established, Kobach said, “The Department of Homeland Security knows of the millions of aliens who are in the United States legally and that data that’s never been bounced against the state’s voter rolls to see whether these people are registered.” He said the federal databases “can be very valuable.”

A month later, as chief of the voting fraud commission, Kobach took steps to compare state information to the SAVE database. He sent a letter to all 50 secretaries of state requesting their voter rolls. Bipartisan outrage ensued. Democrats feared he would use the rolls to encourage states to purge legitimately registered voters. Republicans labelled the request federal overreach.

At trial, Kobach’s main expert on this point was Hans von Spakovsky, another member of the voter fraud commission. He, too, had been eager in commission meetings to match state voter rolls to the SAVE database.

But like Kobach, von Spakovsky took a different tack at trial. He testified that this database was unusable by elections offices. “In your experience and expertise as an election administrator and one who studies elections,” Kobach asked, “is [the alien registration number] a practical or even possible thing for a state to do in its voter registration database?” Von Spakovsky answered, “No, it is not.”

Von Spakovsky and Kobach have been friends for more than a decade. They worked together at the Department of Justice under George W. Bush. Kobach focused on immigration issues — helping create a database to register visitors to the U.S. from countries associated with terrorism — while von Spakovsky specialized in voting issues; he had opposed the renewal of the Voting Rights Act.

Hans von Spakovsky, a member of the voter fraud commission (Douglas Graham/Roll Call/Getty Images)

Von Spakovsky’s history as a local elections administrator in Fairfax County, Va., qualified him as an expert on voting fraud. Between 2010 and 2012, while serving as vice chairman of the county’s three-member electoral board, he’d examined the voter rolls and found what he said were 300 registered non-citizens. He’d pressed for action against them, but none came. Von Spakovsky later joined the Heritage Foundation, where he remains today, generating research that underpins the arguments of those who claim mass voter fraud.

Like Richman, von Spakovsky seemed nervous on the stand, albeit not combative. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a severe, immovable expression. Immigration is a not-so-distant feature of his family history: His parents — Russian and German immigrants — met in a refugee camp in American-occupied Germany after World War II before moving to the U.S.

Von Spakovsky had the task of testifying about what was intended to be a key piece of evidence for Kobach’s case: a spreadsheet of 38 non-citizens who had registered to vote, or attempted to register, in a 20-year period in Sedgwick County, Kansas.

But the 38 non-citizens turned out to be something less than an electoral crime wave. For starters, some of the 38 had informed Sedgwick County that they were non-citizens. One woman had sent her registration postcard back to the county with an explanation that it was a “mistake” and that she was not a citizen. Another listed an alien registration number — which tellingly begins with an “A” — instead of a Social Security number on the voter registration form. The county registered her anyway.

When von Spakovsky took the stand, he had to contend with questions that suggested he had cherry-picked his data. (The judge would find he had.) In his expert report, von Spakovsky had referenced a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office that polled federal courts to see how many non-citizens had been excused from jury duty for being non-citizens — a sign of fraud, because jurors are selected from voter rolls. The GAO report mentioned eight courts. Only one said it had a meaningful number of jury candidates who claimed to be non-citizens: “between 1 and 3 percent” had been dismissed on these grounds. This was the only court von Spakovsky mentioned in his expert report.

His report also cited a 2012 TV news segment from an NBC station in Fort Myers, Fla. Reporters claimed to have discovered more than 100 non-citizens on the local voter roll.

“Now, you know, Mr. von Spakovsky, don’t you, that after this NBC report there was a follow-up by the same NBC station that determined that at least 35 of those 100 individuals had documentation to prove they were, in fact, United States citizens. Correct?” Ho asked. “I am aware of that now, yes,” von Spakovsky replied.

That correction had been online since 2012 and Ho had asked von Spakovsky the same question almost two years before in a deposition before the trial. But von Spakovsky never corrected his expert report.

Under Ho’s questioning, von Spakovsky also acknowledged a false assertion he made in 2011. In a nationally syndicated column for McClatchy, von Spakovsky claimed a tight race in Missouri had been decided by the illegal votes of 50 Somali nationals. A month before the column was published, a Missouri state judge ruled that no such thing had happened.

On the stand, von Spakovsky claimed he had no knowledge of the ruling when he published the piece. He conceded that he never retracted the assertion.

Kobach, who watched the exchange without objection, had repeatedly made the same claim — even after the judge ruled it was false. In 2011, Kobach wrote a series of columns using the example as proof of the need for voter ID, publishing them in outlets ranging from the Topeka Capital-Journal to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. In 2012, he made the claim in an article published in the Syracuse Law Review. In 2013, he wrote an op-ed for the Kansas City Star with the same example: “The election was stolen when Rizzo received about 50 votes illegally cast by citizens of Somalia.” None of those articles have ever been corrected.

Ultimately, Robinson would lacerate von Spakovsky’s testimony, much as she had Richman’s. Von Spakovsky’s statements, the judge wrote, were “premised on several misleading and unsupported examples” and included “false assertions.” As she put it, “His generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence, and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws.”

There was one other wobbly leg holding up the argument that voter fraud is rampant: the very meaning of the word “fraud.”

Kobach’s case, and the broader claim, rely on an extremely generous definition. Legal definitions of fraud require a person to knowingly be deceptive. But both Kobach and von Spakovsky characterized illegal ballots as “fraud” regardless of the intention of the voter.

Indeed, the nine convictions Kobach has obtained in Kansas are almost entirely made up of individuals who didn’t realize they were doing something wrong. For example, there were older voters who didn’t understand the restrictions and voted in multiple places they owned property. There was also a college student who’d forgotten she’d filled out an absentee ballot in her home state before voting months later in Kansas. (She voted for Trump both times.)

Late in the trial, the ACLU presented Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers who has written extensively about voter fraud, as a rebuttal witness. Her book, “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” concluded that almost all instances of illegal votes can be chalked up to misunderstandings and administrative error.

Kobach sent his co-counsel, Garrett Roe, to cross-examine her. “It’s your view that what matters is the voter’s knowledge that his or her action is unlawful?” Roe asked. “In a definition of fraud, yes,” said Minnite. Roe pressed her about this for several questions, seemingly surprised that she wouldn’t refer to all illegal voting as fraud.

Minnite stopped him. “The word ‘fraud’ has meaning, and that meaning is that there’s intent behind it. And that’s actually what Kansas laws are with respect to illegal voting,” she said. “You keep saying my definition” she said, putting finger quotes around “my.” “But, you know, it’s not like it’s a freak definition.”

Kobach had explored a similar line of inquiry with von Spakovsky, asking him if the list of 38 non-citizens he’d reviewed could be absolved of “fraud” because they may have lacked intent.

“No,” von Spakovsky replied, “I think any time a non-citizen registers, any time a non-citizen votes, they are — whether intentionally or by accident, I mean — they are defrauding legitimate citizens from a fair election.”

After Kobach concluded his questions, the judge began her own examination of von Spakovsky.

“I think it’s fair to say there’s a pretty good distinction in terms of how the two of you define fraud,” the judge said, explaining that Minnite focused on intent, while she understood von Spakovsky’s definition to include any time someone who wasn’t supposed to vote did so, regardless of reason. “Would that be a fair characterization?” she asked.

“Yes ma’am,” von Spakovsky replied.

The judge asked whether a greater number of legitimate voters would be barred from casting ballots under the law than fraudulent votes prevented. In that scenario, she asked, “Would that not also be defrauding the electoral process?” Von Spakovsky danced around the answer, asserting that one would need to answer that question in the context of the registration requirements, which he deemed reasonable.

The judge cut him off. “Well that doesn’t really answer my question,” she said, saying that she found it contradictory that he wanted to consider context when examining the burden of registration requirements, but not when examining the circumstances in which fraud was committed.

“When you’re talking about … non-citizen voting, you don’t want to consider that in context of whether that person made a mistake, whether a DMV person convinced them they should vote,” she said. Von Spakovsky allowed that not every improper voter should be prosecuted, but insisted that “each ballot they cast takes away the vote of and dilutes the vote of actual citizens who are voting. And that’s —”

The judge interrupted again. “So, the thousands of actual citizens that should be able to vote but who are not because of the system, because of this law, that’s not diluting the vote and that’s not impairing the integrity of the electoral process, I take it?” she said.

Von Spakovsky didn’t engage with the hypothetical. He simply didn’t believe it was happening. “I don’t believe that this requirement prevents individuals who are eligible to register and vote from doing so.” Later, on the stand, he’d tell Ho he couldn’t think of a single law in the country that he felt negatively impacted anyone’s ability to register or vote.

Robinson, in the end, strongly disagreed. As she wrote in her opinion, “the Court finds that the burden imposed on Kansans by this law outweighs the state’s interest in preventing noncitizen voter fraud, keeping accurate voter rolls, and maintaining confidence in elections.The burden is not just on a ‘few voters,’ but on tens of thousands of voters, many of whom were disenfranchised” by Kobach’s law.The law, she concluded, was a bigger problem than the one it set out to solve, acting as a “deterrent to registration and voting for substantially more eligible Kansans than it has prevented ineligible voters from registering to vote.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/supreme-court-gives-republicans-another-tool-rig-elections-voter-purge-decision

Supreme Court dealtyet another blow to voting rights on Monday, this time giving states the go-ahead to purge their voter rolls, a practice that disproportionately targets Democratic-leaning populations and in particular people of color:

The case hinged on interpretation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), a 1993 civil rights law intended to increase voter registration and participation. But in recent years, some conservative activists began using certain provisions of the law to force states to more aggressively purge their rolls. Those provisions govern what’s known as “list maintenance,” and their stated purpose is to remove people who have moved or passed away. But election officials instead sometimes use list maintenance to remove eligible voters—particularly poor ones and people of color—because they haven’t voted frequently enough. [...]

The court’s 5-4 decision is likely to resurrect an era that the NVRA was meant to end. The practice of purging voters dates back more than 100 years. Just as today, it was justified as a necessary tool to thwart fraud and maintain the integrity of elections. But in practice, it was often used to suppress the votes of those who might not support the party in power. The result of the aggressive purges was that Americans participated in elections at a far lower rate than citizens of other Western democracies. and low election participation rates is just what Republicans want—so Republican-controlled states will doubtless take this anti-democratic Supreme Court decision and run with it, giving Republicans yet another advantage in an increasingly rigged system.

http://wjla.com/news/nation-world/cambridge-analytica

no linx twit

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: Russia may have accessed Facebook data of 87M Americans

by Leandra BernsteinWednesday, May 16th 2018

Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, departs after meeting with House Judiciary Democrats, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, April 24, 2018 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

WASHINGTON (Circa) — Amid reports the data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) is under investigation by the FBI and Department of Justice, a former research director turned whistleblower suggested thecompany engaged in voter suppression, "black ops" and coordinated its U.S. election operations with Russian government entities.

Much has been said about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of millions of Facebook users' data for sophisticated political targeting operations. On Wednesday, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that massive dataset could have been "easily" shared with a Russian intelligence-linked company.

According to a Tuesday report by The New York Times, the FBI and Department of Justice appear to be in the "early stages" of an investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Federal investigators are reportedly looking into the company's business practices and financial dealings.

Investigations of CA and its parent company, SCL, are currently underway in Britain, Australia, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya and India.

Christopher Wylie indirectly confirmed the investigation of his former employer, Cambridge Analytica. Asked by reporters if he was cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference, he replied, "I have been contacted by the FBI."

In his testimony, Wylie again confirmed cooperating with U.S. authorities, saying he had provided relevant documents and information. He added, "It should be made clear, I am not the target of these investigations."

Cambridge Analytica was asked to participate in the Wednesday hearing but after announcing bankruptcy and shutting its doors earlier this month declined the invitation.

View image on Twitter

Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the center of Facebook's privacy scandal is closing. https://bit.ly/2w3WgXK

1:45 PM - May 2, 2018

HOW RUSSIA MAY HAVE ACCESSED THE DATA

In his testimony Wednesday, Wylie faced questions about Cambridge Analytica's numerous ties to Russian government entities, at one point suggesting the Facebook data of 87 million Americans may have been acquired by the Russians.

That massive data transfer may have been facilitated, knowingly or uknowingly by Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL. Nix's London-based company was known for providing "strategic communications" and had defense contracts, commercial engagements and political campaign operations around the globe.

Circa

@Circa

Senate panel agrees with US intel that Russia intervened in 2016 election to help Trump. https://bit.ly/2IoWTkc

10:55 AM - May 16, 2018

See Circa's other Tweets

Wylie described a "high level of engagement" between CA's executive, Alexander Nix and Lukoil, Russia's second largest oil company. Lukoil, which has known ties to Russian intelligence services, was sanctioned in 2017 in connection with the Russian annexation of Crimea.

According to Wylie's account, Nix was in "close contact" with Lukoil executives and in 2014 gave them a whitepaper written by Wylie outlining Cambridge Analytica's U.S. data mining and voter targeting project, which was reportedly of special interest.

Asked by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., if CA's dataset, with information on tens of millions of U.S. Facebook users was also shared with Lukoil, Wylie did not dismiss the possibility. He noted the information could have been "easily acquired" with or without CA's knowledge or consent.

"I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these datasets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that," Wylie said.

CBS News

@CBSNews

Feinstein: Do you think it's possible Facebook data harvested by Cambridge Analytica ended up in Russia?

Wylie: "I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these data sets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that."

7:49 AM - May 16, 2018

In their conversations with Nix, Lukoil executives were informed of "the scale of the data and the location of the data," Wylie said. "What was made known was that this data could have been easily acquired by something as simple as a keylogger on Dr. [Aleksandr] Kogan's computer when he was visiting Russia," he added.

Aleksandr Kogan was a researcher at Cambridge University and professor at Russia's St. Petersburg University and responsible for developing the Facebook quiz app that harvested thousands of datapoints from approximately 87 million unsuspecting Facebook users.

Around 2013, Kogan teamed up with Cambridge Analytica and gained access to the Facebook data. Facebook terminated its contract with Kogan in 2014 and in 2015 sent a letter requesting he delete the harvested data.

Facebook did not follow up and the user data, shared with Cambridge Analytica, was not deleted. Facebook officially suspended Cambridge Analytica's account in March 2018.

The Guardian

@guardian

Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election https://trib.al/uw0yqVr

5:48 AM - May 6, 2018

Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election

Social network failed to make firm delete valuable models derived from data until campaign was over

theguardian.com

109

WIKILEAKS AND 'BLACK OPS'

Among Wylie's other concerns about SCL and Cambridge Analytica's tactics included the firm's so-called "black-ops" capabilities, which he said involved hackers breaking into computers to obtain intelligence or compromising material to use against opposition candidates.

"Some of the targets of these intelligence operations are currently heads of state in various countries," Wylie asserted, saying his former employer hired former members of Russian and Israeli intelligence services for these "special IT services."

In addition,CA also recruited at least two individuals who were "closely associated" with WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, according to Wylie.

DNC sues Trump campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks over alleged 2016 election conspiracy. http://bit.ly/2JaN0CC

2:38 PM - Apr 20, 2018

These individuals were reportedly chosen because of their closeness to WikiLeaks, which was deemed a "hostile intelligence service," by former CIA director Mike Pompeo.

The company has been accused of using a playbook that resembles the WikiLeaks dumping of hacked emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, notably in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election. SCL and Cambridge Analytica denied allegations of hacking.

VOTER SUPPRESSION

Among the allegations Wylie made against his former employer is that it used social media data and complex algorithms to try to suppress the vote. The effort was reportedly done under the banner of "voter disengagement," and was cited by Wylie as one of the main reasons he left CA in July 2014.

At that time, Cambridge Analytica was a relatively new company. It was set up as a U.S. subsidiary of the London-based SCL.

In 2013, SCL's CEO, Alexander Nix, a British citizen, partnered with billionaire conservative donors Robert and Rebecca Mercer and then-Breitbart editor in chief Steve Bannon to set up Cambridge Analytica, or SCL USA. The firm worked on at least 44 congressional campaigns in 2014 and in 2016 managed the data and voter targeting services for President Donald Trump's campaign.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower says Bannon wanted "weapons" to fight a "culture war" at the firm http://hill.cm/FRBTlQl

Wylie suggested this arrangement violated U.S. campaign laws and the U.K.-based parent company to handle "all" of CA's clients. The company reportedly received memos from lawyers warning against using foreign nationals in its U.S. political operations, but it "installed a non-American as its CEO [Nix] and embedded non-U.S. citizens in American campaigns," Wylie said.

Steve Bannon, who went on to serve as President Trump's chief strategist, was the company's vice president during Wylie's tenure and was reportedly very interested in how social media data could be used to identify, target and "exploit" certain subsets of the population, Wylie reported.

Much of Cambridge Analytica's political targeting was informed by the work of Stanford University behavioral researcher Michael Kosinski. Among other things, Kosinski found it was possible to accurately determine a person's sexual orientation, political party and race by analyzing 68 Facebook "likes." Deeper analysis of "likes" resulted in predictive powers that led some to conclude Facebook knows you better than your family.

CNN

@CNN

Facebook knows you better than you think:

• With 10 likes, a computer model fundamentally knows you better than a colleague

• With 70 likes, it knows you better than a friend or roommate

• With 300 likes, Big Data knows you better than your spouse https://cnn.it/2IIWc0Y

9:31 PM - Apr 10, 2018

What you 'like' on Facebook says a lot about you

Big Data can analyze your Facebook "likes" to accurately predict your race, religion, sexual orientation and more.

cnn.com

1,370

1,377 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

According to Wylie, Cambridge Analytica's targeting operations were "designed to activate some of the worst characteristics in people, such as neuroticism, paranoia and racial biases."

Before he left the company, there were "the beginnings of discussions" about how to use the profiling data for "voter disengagement," Wylie told lawmakers. This activity, he said, "was intended to focus on African-American voters."

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie tells Sen. @amyklobuchar that he left Cambridge Analytica in part because of the “beginnings of discussions about voter disengagement” with ads intended to suppress African American voters #tictocnews

Asked by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., if one of Bannon's goals was "to suppress voting or discourage certain individuals in the United States from voting," Wylie said that was his understanding.

Questioned further about whether "voter suppression" was "a service that U.S. clients could request in their contracts" with the company, Wylie referenced documents indicating clients had made that request.

There is room for doubt about the accuracy of Wylie's claims, according to testimony from Eitan Hersh, an expert in civic engagement and voter targeting at Tufts University.

"Persuasion is very, very hard," Hersh said, asserting CA's claims about its targeting accuracy seem "implausible."

"From everything I have seen publicly disclosed about Cambridge Analytica, I am skeptical of the idea that its strategies of voter persuasion were unusually effective or contributed meaningfully to the election outcome," he asserted.

It is not yet clear whether Wylie's allegations are being investigated by the FBI and Department of Justice. The FBI is reportedly coordinating with British authorities in the U.K. investigation of Cambridge Analytica.

According to reports, Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation is looking at Cambridge Analytica's data practices, finances and other activities.

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/13/state_election_leaders_to_senate_armed

1/18 commission disbands, but work goes on

see felon

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/florida-felon-voting-rights-restoration-campaign-threshold-getting-november-2018

A grassroots campaign to amend Florida’s constitution to restore the voting rights of upwards of 1.5 million Floridians who have been convicted of non-violent felonies and completed their sentences is poised to qualify for the November 2018 ballot.

By Wednesday, the Florida Department of State has certified more than 745,000 petition signatures of the 766,000 needed to get on the ballot. The proposed constitutional amendment also has to meet signature thresholds in 14 legislative districts and has done so in 12 of them, campaign organizers said.

“In total, we submitted well over 1.1 million petitions to the supervisors of elections offices all across the state, from Pensacola to Key West,” campaign manager Jackie Lee said on a conference call Tuesday. “And all the petitions, we think, where we needed to verify, were also all in by December 29th, to ensure that we could make the ballot. We all know they needed to be verified by February first. So because of all of your hard work, we had them in on time. We’re... actually even excited to submit a couple right after that date because they kept on coming in from all around the state.”

The felon rights restoration effort is one of America’s most important electoral initiatives in 2018. More than 10 percent of Florida’s voting-age population, 1.7 million residents, have lost their voting rights under the nation’s most punitive felon disenfranchisement law—a statute that has its roots in the Old South’s racist Jim Crow culture.

“This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation,” the legal petition states. “The amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses, who would continue to be permanently barred from voting unless the governor and cabinet vote to restore their voting rights on a case-by-case basis.”

Florida is the third most populous state, with slightly more than 20 million people. In 2016, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 1.2 percent, which was slightly less than 113,000 votes, to win its 29 Electoral College votes. Should 60 percent of Floridians—the threshold for passage—who vote next fall approve the constitutional amendment, it could deeply alter the state’s politics as well as its criminal justice system.

The campaign’s organizers, led by Desmond Meade, a former felon who became a lawyer, are casting their effort as a redemption-steeped crusade to give a second chance to all of those who have done their time for non-violent crimes. In a teleconference organized by Floridians for a Fair Democracy Tuesday, he repeatedly emphasized this was a moral crusade and avoided any discussion of the political consequences.

“I want to make sure we are oriented right back where we started from,” Meade told the 150 activists, including clergy, on the call. “When each and every one of you made a decision to be involved in this campaign, it was based around people. It was based around the personal stories of your family members and your friends who were looking for second chances in Florida. And I think it is this orientation that has not only gotten us this far, but will take [us] across this finish line. It’s not about anything else. It’s not about politics. At the core of this, it’s about everyday all-American citizens, who just want a second chance.”

Meade’s framing, which reflects his life story, has resounded because Florida has so many ex-felons who cut across society. Only 30 percent are black, campaign organizers said, and a great many were victims of overzealous drug war prosecutions. Evidence of that deep resonance can be found in the fact that nearly a quarter-million of the petition signatures gathered were collected from volunteers, not paid circulators.

“We are very confident with moving forward with the campaign,” said Lee. “As of right now before the call, we are at 745,000 verified of the 766,200 that we need. So we are approaching that overall number and we are also verified in 12 of the 14 [legislative] districts that we need. So we are marching forward.”

Emphasizing Redemption, Not Political Power

...

lappe moore

daring democracy small planet inst kpfa 1/11/18

https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-january-11-2018/

CA, machine upgrade after hanging chad, then we had activists force paper record

VA?

ca voter fdn

https://www.amazon.com/Daring-Democracy-Igniting-Meaning-Connection/dp/0807023817

https://thefranchiseproject.com/

legit activist defense , scorecard

see sep node

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/trumps-vote-suppression-team-doing-gops-dirty-work

Anyone who favors expanding voting rights should be relieved by Wednesday’s demise of President Trump’s so-called Election Integrity Commission.But the panel’s right-wing agenda to rig the voting process to benefit the GOP will continue.

There’s plenty to cheer about when white nationalists like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice-chair, and voter suppressors like the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky were discredited by a panel run in a secretive, conspiratorial and clownish manner. But these Republicans are not giving up on their plan to create new barriers to eligible voters.

“Amid many challenges for the institutions of American democracy, this was a rousing win,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. “No doubt, there is fallout to come… The commission has vanished, but its pernicious objectives persist. The White House has asked the Department of Homeland Security to take up the commission’s work—a dangerous and appalling idea. Earlier this morning, the president took to Twitter to renew calls for voting restrictions.”

Indeed, Kobach signaled his next move to Politico, which noted, “The Kansas official said he expects officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and political appointees overseeing that agency to take over the commission’s work and begin efforts to match state voter rolls to federal databases of noncitizens. He insisted he was not disappointed with the president’s decision.”

“It’s the right move,” Kobach said. “It’s a shifting in tactics from having the investigation be done by a federal commission to having it be done by a federal agency. The agency has a greater ability to move quickly to get the investigation done.”

The GOP Strategy Unmasked

Kobach’s is referring to a strategy employed by the most fervent partisan Republicans to position red-run states to keep new registrants from voting and do mass purges of infrequent but otherwise legal voters from their rolls. In short, it draws on intentionally sloppy data-mining to creates thousands of false positives that are then used to stymie voters. That porous data has been used in recent cycles in Georgia to delay approving new registrations and to accelerate mass purges of voter rolls. But it's not just Georgia.

In 2014, Florida’s top election official proposed using DHS’s problematic citizenship data to purge voter rolls. In response, county election supervisors rebelled and blocked it—because they still felt the sting of the 2000 election, when Secretary of State Katherine Harris used sloppy data-mining (seeking former felons who could not vote under that state's laws) to purge tens of thousands of eligible voters before that year's presidential election.

If Kobach has his way, the contours of that sordid history will repeat itself, including using a DHS database that was never designed to be an authoritative list of every U.S. citizen. But in the years since Harris’ Florida purge, the right-wing strategy has become clear.

Republicans like Kobach strategically target weak points in the voting process. They pinpoint areas in the process that are ambiguous, or where there’s no authoritative national data to counter their claims of purported illegal activity.

For example, there is no federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, which these right-wingers define as someone impersonating someone else at the polls to vote more than once, and has become the go-to justificatiom for red-run states to erect new barriers to voting century. Since there’s no single federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, it becomes a useful propaganda tool for Republicans because it's left to acacdemics and the media to debunk it, which these partisans routinely ignore.

The latest high-profile example of this narrative is Trump's thoroughly debunked claim that millions of Democrats illegally voted more than once to deprive him of 2016’s popular vote majority.But that lie, recited again by Trump’s press office when announcing the commission’s demise, resonates among supporters who want to believe all Democrats are crooks despite vast documentation by academics and the press that voter fraud barely exists. In the absence of an authoritative federal accounting, it becomes an easy pretext for red states to pass laws to, as they purport, police the process’ integrity. In reality, they thwart Democratic voters.

Not surprisingly, on Thursday, Kobach spewed that same line to—where else?—Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. “They [Democrats] have absolutely no interest in stopping voter fraud,” Kobach told Breitbart. “It’s truly extraordinary that one party in our system has made clear that they don’t care… Some people on the Left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”

What's wrong with these figures? Beyond the fact that some of these numbers, like his Kansas statistics, have been debunked, what’s missing is the context or the larger number, the denominator if you will: that is, how many people voted legally in all the years cited? In other words, how pervasive is this problem? What is its real magnitude in the real world of voting?Kobach, pretending to be authoritative, then cited figures that also have been pedaled by the Heritage Foundation's von Spakovsky. “The voter fraud commission has revealed: 938 convictions for voter fraud since the year 2000,” he said. “Fewer than 1 in 100 cases ends in a conviction. In Kansas, alone, there are 127 known cases of non-citizen aliens registering to vote. In 21 states, there were 8,471 cases of double voting discovered.”

The answer is it is a trifle. That's because that well over half a billion people have voted in federal elections alone since 2000, which means the 938 figure is close to a once-in-a-million occurrence. Nonetheless, the absence of an authoritative federal agency tracking this activity and issuing authoritative reports that are respected by legislatures and the courts, perpetuates Kobach’s propaganda. Its absence continues to serve as a red-state pretext to overly police voting—as seen in Trump’s Thursday tweets.

Kobach Wants ICE to Vet New Voters?

That fabricated backdrop for imposing new restrictions on voting takes us to what’s new and potentially insidious about Kobach’s latest gambit. He wants the Department of Homeland Security to take responsibility for preventing “non-citizen aliens” from voting. Just like voter fraud, there is no authoritative federal database—even at DHS—listing every American citizen. Their database is designed to ensure welfare recipients are entitles to their benefits; but it is not a list of every U.S. citizen.

That deficiency creates an opening which right-wingers like Kobach, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner have sought to exploit—and have exploited—to game the process of voting to up the GOP’s chances of winning. Because DHS’s citizenship database is incomplete, it cannot confirm the citizenship of every new person registering to vote. That omission was exploited by Kemp to delay processing tens of thousands of new voter registrations in 2014. After that November, almost all of those registrations were approved; but not for the election those Georgians wanted to vote in.

When Detzner tried to force Florida county election offices to use DHS’s citizenship data to purge voter rolls—initially claiming, like Kobach, that there were hundreds of thousands of illegally registered voters—local officials balked and forced him to back down. Later, it was revealed that there were fewer than 100 questionable registrants among Florida's 10 million-plus registered voters.

Why would Republicans focus on proof of citizenship in order to vote? Because, as the Brennan Center reported in 2006 and updated in a report last summer, an estimated 7 percent of eligible voters don’t have such documentation, typically a birth certificate or passport. In other words, adding proof of citizenship to register will reduce participation in elections. (Think of it as a barrier at the starting line of the process, just as stricter state voter ID requirements is a barrier at the finish line.)

“A nationwide survey by the Brennan Center in November 2006 found that 7 percent of the citizen voting age population, or 13 million people, did not possess documents that would prove their citizenship,” the Center’s July 2017 reportsaid. “The rate is twice as high among citizens earning less than $25,000 per year. Women who changed their name upon getting married are especially likely to lack the relevant documents: A third of voting-age women don’t have proof of citizenship that reﬂects their current name.”

In other words, making proof of citizenship a new requirement before getting a ballot will mostly hurt likely Democrats.

Bad Data as a Partisan Tool

Republicans also know that the use of incomplete citizenship data can be used to stymie voters on Election Day. That's because it is a tool to do pre-emptive voter roll purges, in which inactive voters, especially in blue epicenters, can be disproportionately purged or removed from voting in the next election without reregistering.

That’s not a paranoid scenario. The Supreme Court will later this month hear a case over that very issue from Ohio, where GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted took advantage of two contradictory sentences in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to purge tens of thousands of mostly Democratic voters from his state’s three biggest cities. Reuters' reporters analyzed the purge and found it was mostly aimed at Democrats. Here again, the GOP saw and seized on a legal ambiguity and used data to tilt the process.

The reason Kobach and Trump’s commission was so bent on adding a new proof of citizenship standard is it benefits the GOP in many ways. First, as the Brennan Center noted, 7 percent of otherwise eligible voters don’t have the paper documentation.(Today people sign their name on registration forms as an oath under penalty of perjury; these Republicans say that's not good enough.) Beyond that, knowingly turning to sloppy data-mining to additionally delay new registrants further helps the GOP by thwarting grassroots registration drives. And using bad data to imprecisely target infrequent voters for selective purges also helps them.

The Voting Wars Continue

It’s a good thing that media scrutiny and public criticism of Trump’s election commission shut down that sham panel. But it was only one means to an end that is still in the GOP’s sights. Indeed, just this week it was revealed thst the Justice Department asked the U.S. Census to include a question on citizenship, citing a need to use that information to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.

Kobach and his ilk will do anything to subvert the process of voting for Democrats and non-whites. They’ve burrowed into the nooks and crannies of the law and process to exploit ambiguities and contradictions. Just watch what they will try to do in the months ahead—not just with baseless voter fraud accusation, but with screening for citizenship. As they wrap themselves in the flag, look at their data-mining. They know it’s shoddy and going to yield huge numbers of false positives, and that’s just what they want.

Steven Rosenfeld

https://www.alternet.org/immigration/trumps-doj-has-audacious-new-project-suppress-vote

Civil rights advocates have raised alarms because the Department of Justice has asked the U.S. Census to include a question about citizenship in its 2020 national survey. But the way the Trump administration has framed this request also shows it's poised to make proof of citizenship the latest voter suppression tool.

As many civil rights groups have noted, asking immigrant families to disclose undocumented relatives will push people to evade Census takers or simply lie, causing an undercount and diverting federal funds away from locales with immigrant populations.

“The Justice Department’s untimely and unnecessary request to the U.S. Census Bureau to add a question to the 2020 Census would destroy any chance for an accurate count,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Gupta noted that the Justice Department justified its request by saying it was needed to enforce voting rights.

“The Justice Department has never needed to add this new question to the decennial census to enforce the Voting Rights Act before," Gupta said. "Contrary to the Justice Department’s letter, the Census Bureau has not included a citizenship question on the modern census ‘short form,’ sent to every household, since enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.”

The DOJ’s mid-December letter requesting the citizenship question is the latest anti-immigrant development from the Trump administration, but it also underscores that the DOJ’s Voting Rights Section is now being run by right-wing Republicans who are known for wanting otherwise eligible voters to present paper proof of citizenship to register—which some key blue constituencies lack.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions comes from one of a handful of states that require would-be voters to produce paper proof of citizenship to register to vote in state elections. To vote in federal elections, they can simply sign an oath at the bottom of the federal registration form. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who heads Trump’s so-called Election Integrity Commission, has made this separate and unequal standard a personal crusade. He and his allies, including those in the DOJ who are pushing the Census to ask about citizenship, are ignoring that every person who registers must declare they are a citizen and that their signature is a sworn legal oath.

(Editor's note: Late on Wednesday, Trump disbanded this commission, a victory for pro-voting advocates who criticized its secrecy, voter suppression agenda and illegal handling of public records. However, Kobach commented he will pursue its goals through the Department of Homeland Security, which has jurisdiction over citizenship.)

Why would Republicans focus on proof of citizenship in order to vote? Because, as the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law reported in 2006 and updated in a report last summer, an estimated 7 percent of eligible voters don’t have such documentation—typically a birth certificate or passport. In other words, adding proof of citizenship to register will reduce participation in elections. (Think of it as a barrier at the starting line of the process, just as stricter state voter ID requirements is a barrier at the finish line.)

That 7 percent figure hasn’t changed in the past decade, the 2017 report by senior counsel Ian Vandewalker said. “In fact, national studies show that between 5 and 7 percent of Americans don’t have any documents to prove their citizenship. Birth certiﬁcates are frequently lost or destroyed. The most recent State Department statistics indicate that 59 percent of Americans don’t have passports.”

Seen narrowly, the Justice Department’s 11th-hour request to add a citizenship question to the next Census is a disruptive anti-immigrant action, because it will likely lead to undercounts that will deprive states and cities of funds for their migrant populations. But seen broadly, it signals the Department’s Voting Section has a selective enforcement agenda with deep partisan implications.

“A study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in September 2006 reached substantially the same conclusion [as Brennan]:

...

===

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/florida-may-restore-voting-rights-17-million-ex-felons-so-long-republicans

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/civil-rights-group-reaches-agreement-mississippi-reinstate-over-100000-drivers

also related to voter suppression?

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/can-democrats-extend-blue-wave-swept-doug-jones-office-2018

...Jones’ victory was many things. It was a triumph for grassroots organizing in a state that hadn’t seen a Democratic upset in years. It was an affirmation that a good candidate can inspire people to turn out in droves to defeat a bad candidate who turns off his party’s base and the public. And it was perhaps a sign that voters have had enough of the tribalism that infects modern politics, epitomized by the GOP under Donald Trump.

But how much of what Jones accomplished in Alabama can be applied or repeated elsewhere? In some ways, his election was a special case. Sex scandal-plagued Roy Moore was a truly terrible candidate. Most establishment Republicans avoided him or kept away until the end—like President Trump and the national party committees. It was also a surprise that might not have happened if Sen. Richard Shelby hadn't told fellow Republicans to write in another name—not Moore's. (There were nearly 23,000 write-in votes; 2,100 more than Jones' margin of victory.)

While these dynamics are unlikely to recur in 2018, there are takeaways from Alabama that apply to the most critical congressional and gubernatorial races next year. That's when two-thirds of the Senate contests are incumbent Democrats facing re-election and Democrats need 24 seats to retake the House. While there are unknowns, such as how much the GOP tax plan and Trump will weigh down Republican candidates, there is a starting-line landscape found in red-run states like Alabama. That's where the GOP has spent this decade creating supermajorities and voting rules that benefit them and undermine Democrats.

That red-state gaming of the electoral field begins with extreme redistricting, or segregating each party’s reliable voters to give GOP candidates a 6-to-8 percent lead in their districts. It continues by suppressing Democratic turnout via stricter voter ID requirements, which knocks off another 2 to 3 percent in the fall, followed by other voter suppression measures. (These figures are cited in court rulings, congressional studies and academic papers.)

Jones’ victory underscores key lessons about the hurdles facing Democrats next year in states like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. The big takeaway, as evidenced by every major election in 2017, including Alabama, is that winning takes a giant turnout wave supporting Democrats, and a corresponding average turnout from Republican voters.

Wave Elections and Turnout

That's the pattern that voter turnout experts saw in Alabama. The wave was most visibly led by the African-American community, whose voting rights heritage gave the nation Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a moral imperative to vote no matter what. But there was also high pro-Jones turnout in college towns and among suburbanites, many of whom voted for Trump in 2016. These trends were noted on Twitter posts by election experts Tuesday and in analyses of media exit poll data on Wednesday.

The first sign that Jones could win was seen in the extraordinary high turnout by African Americans.

“Amazing: turnout is at 72%-77% of ‘16 presidential race in heavily black counties, but just 55%-60% in rural white counties. Black voters punching above their weight tonight & giving Jones a chance,” tweeted the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman on Tuesday as the precinct-by-precinct returns were rolling in.

“To win, Jones needs: 1) Ridiculous Dem margins in Birmingham/Montgomery 2) Strong crossover from college whites in Huntsville/Shelby 3) Not much drop-off from '16 turnout in Black Belt 4) Weak/typical off year turnout among non-college whites,” Wasserman predicted on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he tweeted. “What happened last night? All four of these things.”

“Hot takes that #ALSEN Republicans stayed home I think are incorrect,” McDonald tweeted. “Turnout is typically low in a special special election. Republican counties turned out at a rate we might typically expect, perhaps even more so given the competitive race. Democrat turnout was through the roof.”Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor and turnout expert, debunked the claim that Alabama Republicans stayed home. What happened, he said, was that the state's GOP base behaved just as predicted in any off-year special election.

The pro-GOP Weekly Standard also noted that many whites voted for Jones as well.

“Jones won a substantial number of white voters,” David Byler noted. “According to exit polls, Jones won 31 percent of white voters and 96 percent of black voters. Typically, Democrats win large majorities of black voters in southern states while losing many white voters. In 2012, the exit polls showed President Obama earning 15 percent of the white vote. And while exit polls do have their disadvantages, it’s worth noting that the New York Times’ Upshot also estimated that Obama won 16 percent of the white vote in 2012. Jones did significantly better with white voters while still holding onto lopsided margins with black voters.”

The New York Times noted Jones won big among women in upscale suburbs, generally a Republican haven. That figure is not surprising, given that several Alabama women said Moore had sexually preyed on them in their teen years, while Jones was a prosecutor who convicted KKK members whose bombs killed several black teenage girls.

Momentum Going Into 2018

Looking to 2018, it’s clear the electorate’s energy and enthusiasm have shifted from Republicans and independents electing Trump to growing factions backing Democratic candidates. In every major election this year, Democrats have done far better than expected. But that doesn’t mean they won on Election Day.

Jon Ossoff, in Georgia’s sixth U.S. House district, who lost amid dubious vote counts—and post-Election Day disclosures that the state had destroyed his race's vote count records—still did better than any Democrat in his district in years.

Last month in Virginia, Democrat Ralph Northam won the governor’s race and a surge of voters backing Democrats brought the party to the brink of retaking the House of Delegates, despite a 2011 gerrymander that gave the GOP a supermajority. The GOP is up by two seats, while four races are being recounted, starting this week.

Jones’ victory is also remarkable because Alabamians experienced voter suppression tactics, according to accounts posted on Twitter by political reporters and election protection attorneys. These obstructions that can make the difference in close elections.

On Tuesday, many polling places were unprepared and experienced long lines. There were voting machine breakdowns and shortages. There was police intimidation of voters, checking IDs for people with outstanding fines. There were voters that had been incorrectly purged. There were others complaints of voters not receiving absentee ballots. There was confusion over poorly designed ballots. All of these are unnecessary hurdles to what should be a straightforward process.

Election observers squarely blamed Alabama’s hyper-partisan GOP Secretary of State, John Merrill, for much of that dysfunction. Merrill’s low voter turnout estimates left polls unprepared for Tuesday’s turnout, which one turnout expert said was “bordering on malpractice.” As late as Tuesday on national TV, Merrill predicted only 25 percent of the state’s 3.3 million registered voters would turn out, when 40 percent did—a figure every academic turnout expert had predicted based on recent special elections.

Fair-minded Americans should be cheered by Alabama’s results. For once, a deserving candidate, supported by a diverse and energized grassroots coalition, inspired a flood of citizens to turn out and not be deterred from voting. But it took a giant wave just to barely beat an unusually bad candidate, including an unexpected last-minute assist from the state's senior Republican senator.

Democrats will have to repeat this giant wave in 2018 to breach the red-state barriers that stand between them and winning back control of Congress and key governorships. In red-run swing states that should be politically purple, the GOP has a 10 percent starting line advantage. Even with a large turnout wave, there's no telling what surprises await—for better or worse....

Two sessions at a summit this week for one of the country’s most powerful conservative groups will focus on voting, something civil rights groups and voting advocates are alarmed by and say could signal the group’s renewed interest in restrictive voting policies.

The focus on voting from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is significant because the group disbanded its Public Safety and Elections Task Force in 2012 following significant pressure from civil rights groups. Beginning in 2009, the task force helped draft model legislation for states to impose voter ID requirements that critics say makes it more difficult for people to vote.

ALEC is an association of about 2,000 state lawmakers with close ties to big business and conservative groups. ALEC produces model legislation on conservative issues that lawmakers can then introduce in their respective statehouses. Among the model measures ALEC backed is the controversial “stand your ground law” and legislation that limit the ability of localities to raise the minimum wage.

An ALEC spokeswoman said in 2012 the organization was ending the task force to focus more on economic issues. But at a policy summit this week, the group will hold two panels focused on voting issues, setting off alarm bells among activists.

“After a lot of controversy over voter ID, ALEC disbanded its task force that dealt with democracy issues and purported to be out of the business of mucking around with voting laws,” said Arn Pearson, general counsel for the Center for Media and Democracy, a group that closely follows ALEC. “This is the first time we’re seeing them come back in on it.”

One of the panels will be a “voter integrity workshop,” in which election experts will “discuss important voting policies and legislation in the states to improve the integrity of elections, the accuracy and security of state voter registration rolls, and new ways to verify the eligibility of voters.” The panel will also discuss “policy concerns” regarding automatic voter registration, a reform with bipartisan support advocates believe can add millions of Americans to the voting rolls.

A different panel will focus on redistricting as states gear up for the next round of redrawing electoral maps in 2021. The workshop will focus on “significant legal changes from the past decade; a rundown of ongoing litigation, ballot measures, and legislation; what apportionment might look like after the 2020 census and what challenges that will present.” The workshop will also look at what “groups are doing to address the multi-front campaign to shift the redistricting landscape – and find new “rights” in the Constitution.” The workshop will be led by a group called Fair Lines America, a group Pearson said he had never heard of and doesn’t appear to have an online presence.

The panel comes as the Supreme Court is considering a case out of Wisconsin that could, for the first time, set a standard for when gerrymandering can go too far to benefit one political party.

Jay Riestenberg, who closely follows ALEC for Common Cause, a public interest watchdog, said only a few states had adopted voter ID measures before ALEC took an interest in the issue in 2009. When it got out of the business of dealing with voter laws in 2012, he said, they only did so after successfully spreading voter ID laws to dozens of states. Thirty-four states have measures requiring voters to show some kind of identification at the polls.

Bill Meierling, an ALEC spokesman, said the group “does not work on or maintain policy election issues.”

“Workshops are part of the ALEC meeting and can cover a range of issues that may or may not be related to ALEC policy/work,” he said in an email.

Pearson said he was skeptical the panel’s were purely informational.

“ALEC is a pay-to-play outfit. Member organizations pay to sponsor events and workshops. Typically if something is showing up on the agenda it’s because somebody wants to push it,” he said.

“ALEC has been a very anti-democratic organization since its founding. It brings corporate lobbyists and state legislators behind closed doors to trade these so-called model bills,” Riestenberg said. “They’re kind of opposed to the very idea of representative democracy, and so when they have panels about voting and what they call voter fraud or voter integrity, it kind of raises red flags given their history on the issue and their kind of anti-democratic structure.”

Riestenberg said he was surprised ALEC did not post the names of speakers on the panel, something he said it had done in years past. ALEC officials did not respond to a question about who would be speaking on the panels.

The panels also have increased significance amid President Donald Trump’s allegations of widespread voter fraud and a commission he created in May to investigate it. Led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), members of the panel have favored voter ID, proof of citizenship laws and forcing states to more aggressively purge their voter rolls.

J. Christian Adams,a member of the Trump voter fraud probe, said in a statement he would be participating in the ALEC panel about election integrity. Adams has sued jurisdictions to try and force them to more aggressively purge their voting rolls and has said the Department of Justice is not doing enough to make sure states are maintaining accurate rolls.

Critics say the commission is an effort to weaken confidence in the U.S. election system and to lay the groundwork for more restrictive voting policies. Several studies and investigations have found voter fraud is not a widespread issue.

“There was evidence that ALEC was behind the spate of strict voter ID laws that started to be enacted throughout the country and have been found to have a voter suppressive impact,” said Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the voting rights project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the groups suing Trump’s voter fraud commission. “Given the present environment with the Pence/Kobach commission moving toward voter purges, we do fear that this could begin another era of suppressive voter laws.”

Trump’s commission has temporarily paused as it faces multiple lawsuits. Riestenberg said ALEC could be working to continue the commission’s work.

“I kind of expected this to be the next wave. The Pence/Kobach commission is caught up in lawsuits. They’re trying to figure out what’s their next move. I think ALEC and other state level advocacy groups on the conservative side are their venue to actually push their agenda since they can’t do it through the commission.”

Huffington Post | Published: 12/6/2017

“After a lot of controversy over voter ID, ALEC disbanded its task force that dealt with democracy issues and purported to be out of the business of mucking around with voting laws,” said Arn Pearson, general counsel for the Center for Media and Democracy, a group that closely follows ALEC. “This is the first time we’re seeing them come back in on it.

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/can-democrats-extend-blue-wave-swept-doug-jones-office-2018

[Dem Doug]...Jones’ victory was many things. It was a triumph for grassroots organizing in a state that hadn’t seen a Democratic upset in years. It was an affirmation that a good candidate can inspire people to turn out in droves to defeat a bad candidate who turns off his party’s base and the public. And it was perhaps a sign that voters have had enough of the tribalism that infects modern politics, epitomized by the GOP under Donald Trump.

That red-state gaming of the electoral field begins with extreme redistricting, or segregating each party’s reliable voters to give GOP candidates a 6-to-8 percent lead in their districts. It continues by suppressing Democratic turnout via stricter voter ID requirements, which knocks off another 2 to 3 percent in the fall, followed by other voter suppression measures. (These figures are cited in court rulings, congressional studies and academic papers.)

Wave Elections and Turnout

The first sign that Jones could win was seen in the extraordinary high turnout by African Americans.

The pro-GOP Weekly Standard also noted that many whites voted for Jones as well.

Momentum Going Into 2018

Election observers squarely blamed Alabama’s hyper-partisan GOP Secretary of State, John Merrill, for much of that dysfunction. Merrill’s low voter turnout estimates left polls unprepared for Tuesday’s turnout, which one turnout expert said was “bordering on malpractice.” As late as Tuesday on national TV, Merrill predicted only 25 percent of the state’s 3.3 million registered voters would turn out, when 40 percent did—a figure every academic turnout expert had predicted based on recent special elections.

nation’s leading law groups defending expanded voting rights Wednesday warned hundreds of election officials across the nation not to be intimidated by right-wing threats to more aggressively purge voter rolls, saying they would defend them in court if necessary.

“There’s no rhyme or reason to the 248 jurisdictions that have been identified” by the Public Interest Legal Foundation(PILF), said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “They include communities both large and small. They include communities with substantial numbers of African-American and Latino and other minority voters. But what we do observe is there has been a renewed focus on purge programs as a tool for suppressing the rights of voters.”

The Public Interest Legal Foundation is led by J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department Voting Section attorney who joined the DOJ in 2005 to help implement the Bush administration’s national crusade against so-called voter impersonation fraud—a thoroughly debunked partisan crusade to disenfranchise blue voters. The Trump campaign in 2016 and his administration have revived this discredited narrative as a ruse for red-run states to impose additional barriers to likely Democratic voters. That partisan playbook includes purging legally registered voters, especially those who tend to vote only in presidential years.

“This summer the Justice Department issued a letter to election officials across the country, soliciting information on their, quote, [registered voter] list maintenance procedures,” Clarke said. “That letter was issued on the same day as the President’s Election Integrity Commission [where Adams is a member] issued a letter to state election officials seeking data on virtually every American voter across the country, among other things. So this appears to be part of a pattern that we are seeing across the country of using purge programs, and so-called list maintenance procedures, as a tool for restricting the rights of legitimately registered voters.”

The Lawyers’ Committee, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School and Demos—all legal advocates that have defended the right to vote for years and fought voter suppression tactics in court—said Wednesday that they would be sending letters to the local offices targeted by PILF. Their letters will urge local election officials to not be intimidated by PILF’s threat of suits unless they proved, to PILF’s satisfaction, that they had purged sufficient numbers of legally registered voters.

PILF’s threats fit a pattern established by GOP vote suppressors to intentionally use dubious statistics and legal threats to remove otherwise legal voters, the lawyers said.

“Oftentimes the same groups or individuals that are asserting the need for purge programs are coupling that with misleading or inaccurate claims about potentially ineligible voters,” Jonathan Brater, Brennan Center Democracy Program counsel, said. “Whether that takes the form of this flawed methodology that is based on a crude comparison of Census data and registration lists, or shoddy claims about potential non-citizens or others who may be registered to vote.”

Top state election regulators in states like Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolinaand Kansas, all of whom are Republicans, have deliberately used shoddy data, or intentionally sloppy data mining producing false positives, to claim that their states’ voter rolls are overflowing with ineligible or illegal voters, and then removed thousands of perfectly legal voters. The Public Interest Legal Foundation follows this same script.

PILF’s latest letter to local election officials reads, “Federal law requires election officials to conduct a reasonable effort to maintain voter registration lists free of dead voters, ineligible voters, and voters who have moved away... Based on our comparison of publicly available information published by the U.S. Census Bureau and the federal Election Assistance Commission, it appears that your jurisdiction is failing to comply with these federal law requirements.”

The problem with PILF’s claim is that the Census data it cites, gathered once a decade, does not track the latest yearly demographic changes, such as people moving, the voting rights attorneys said. Thus, comparing old Census data to more recent voter registration lists is an apples-and-oranges comparison that creates inaccurate impressions that there might be error-plagued voter rolls. The Lawyers’ Committee’s Clarke said PILF uses this dubious methodology to accuse local officials of mismanaging voter lists—which are in a constant state of flux because people register, move and die—and thus bully local officials into purging otherwise legal voters.

“This action by PILF is a clear attempt to incite and bully election officials to institute voter purge programs in their respective jurisdiction,” Clarke said. “We will not stand by idly and wait for the fallout from PILF’s dangerous national campaign.”

She said the voting rights groups were concerned some local election officials had been successfully bullied by PILF. Some who opted to avoid a legal fight had entered into settlements with PILF. In those agreements, the right-wingers required the localities to use other problematic federal databases to screen and purge voter lists, such as a Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system. The SAVE database provides immigration and citizenship status, but it is not complete, as there is no authoritative federal citizenship database. When Florida’s GOP election director tried to force county officials to use SAVE a few years ago, the local officials vigorously protested, objecting to the flawed data. That very rare display by election officials prompted Florida Republicans to back down and let the local officials do their jobs according to protocols established under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

More recently, some localities targeted by PILF have buckled, the attorneys said. But others haven’t, forcing PILF to back off.

“There’s really no basis" for PILF's claims of sloppy voter rolls, Naifeh said. “It’s only when they get a sweetheart consent decree that we see the worst elements of these kinds of [voter purge] programs coming into play.”“They [local election officials] entered into consent decrees on behalf of supposed local election integrity groups, in Mississippi mainly, and a few in Texas,” Stuart Naifeh, Demos counsel, said. “And what they [PILF] have sought is things like we see in Ohio. They ask states to agree to purge people based on [recent] non-voting, and occasionally to use the SAVE database in certain places. And what we’ve seen is when these jurisdictions fight back, those things are not part of the settlements.”

But under the Trump administration, PILF—led by J. Christian Adams—has been targeting electoral districts in swing states.

“They have more recently targeted larger jurisdictions, such as Wake County, North Carolina; Broward County, Florida; and Alexandria, Virginia,” Naifeh said. “Though none of the larger jurisdictions they targeted have entered into consent decrees that contain these problematic practices. Alexandria, Virginia, got the case dismissed and the judge admonished them for not doing an adequate investigation and bringing the case solely on the basis of shoddy registration rate calculations. Wake County agreed to a settlement that essentially just required them to do what they already are doing. And Broward County, Florida, the case went to trial and there’s still no decision yet.”

The voting rights groups said they would be sending letters to the 248 localities targeted by PILF, reminding them about the legal process for removing voters and offering to help if sued by PILF.

“We’re issuing letters that essentially do three things,” said Clarke. “One, we impart an accurate overview of the National Voter Registration Act and caution that any premature attempt to purge voters from the rolls may run afoul of the NVRA. Two, we include a request for data and documents from the jurisdictions, to ensure transparency with respect to any actions that they may have already taken in response to the letters from the Public Interest Legal Foundation… And then finally we let them know that we are available to provide support and counsel to them, should it be necessary if the Public Interest Legal Foundation takes legal action, as they’ve threatened to do in their letter.”

“We know that there are election officials who share our consternation about the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s actions,” she said. “Alex Pedilla, Secretary of State for California, has been dismissive of the foundation’s request, and noted that it is request based on bad data and a flawed methodology. Part of the end goal here is to ensure that jurisdictions can know they can turn to us for legal support, should they face action at the hands of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-judges-aim-end-progressive-state

...federal courts that struck down his “Muslim travel ban” on three separate occasions, that blocked his ban on trans people in the military and that did the same to his attempt to defund so-called sanctuary cities.

But the makeup of America’s judges is quietly becoming the site of one of Trump’s most unequivocal successes: nominating and installing judges who reflect his own worldview at a speed and volume unseen in recent memory. Trump could conceivably have handpicked more than 30% of the nation’s federal judges before the end of his first term, his advisers have suggested, and independent observers agree.

“The president himself has said that he expects this to be one of his major legacies. He is going to reshape the bench for generations to come,” said Douglas Keith, counsel with the fair courts arm of the Brennan Center for Justice.

“I do think this deserves more attention given the consequence, the significance of what will eventually be a wholesale change among the federal judiciary,” he continued.

Much has been made of Trump’s failure to get legislation through Congress and received wisdom suggests that he has little to show for his first 10 months in power. However, the lasting impact that court picks have on the lives of Americans means that Trump’s choices – and the sheer numbers involved – will help reshape America for the next half-century.

Until recently little attention has been paid to Trump’s judicial appointments. But Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware and a member of the Senate judiciary committee, identified the importance of these appointments early on. In June he said: “This will be the single most important legacy of the Trump administration. They will quickly be able to put judges on circuit courts all over the country, district courts all over the country, that will, given their youth and conservatism, have a significant impact on the shape and trajectory of American law for decades.

The lack of diversity in Trump’s picks was highlighted by the Associated Press. They ran the numbers on the 58 people nominated by the Trump administration to lifetime positions on appeal courts, district courts, and the supreme court. Of those, 53 are white, three are Asian American, one is Hispanic and one is African American.

Forty seven are men and 11 are women.

...

Perhaps the most brazen of Trump’s early picks is Brett Talley, an Alabama attorney just three years out of law school who has yet to try a case. The American Bar Association gave Talley a unanimous rating of “unqualified” for the post but that did not stop him from breezing through a confirmation hearing in the Senate judiciary committee. Neither did the fact that Talley appears to have blogged favorably about the KKK and statutory rape on message boards and failed to disclose in his questionnaire that his wife is a staffer in the White House.

Trump is “appointing hacks and cronies which I think is either intentionally or just has the effect of signaling contempt for legal process”, Azmy said.

Some of the other stand-out Trump picks include Jeff Mateer, a Texas attorney who has openly admitted that he discriminates against LGBT people, and Thomas Farr, who has spearheaded multiple legal efforts to suppress the black vote in his home state of North Carolina.

“It is no exaggeration to say that had the White House deliberately sought to identify an attorney in North Carolina with a more hostile record on African-American voting rights and workers’ rights than Thomas Farr, it could hardly have done so,” wrote the Congressional Black Caucus in a letter to Trump urging him to withdraw the nomination.

One thing Mateer, Talley and Farr all have in common, like a startling 74% of Trump’s nominees, is that they are all white men. According to the Associated Press, if Trump continues on this trend through his first term, he will be the first Republican since Herbert Hoover to name fewer women and minorities to the court than his GOP predecessor.

“This is a striking move in the direction away from diversity that is not just attributable to them wanting to appoint more conservative judges,” who will tend to be whiter and more male than the general population, said Douglas Keith.

And the impact that can have for generations is hard to overstate. “Federal courts shape laws, they shape the constitution, they affect people’s rights, and at core they impact how our democracy functions,” Keith said. “Conservatives have understood the importance of these courts, they’ve been organizing around them for decades, and have been able to move their supporters in ways that the left hasn’t.”

That has involved, first and foremost, building a pipeline of potential conservative candidates, Keith said. Conservative groups like the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have become de facto clearing houses for Republican presidents and they absolutely have Trump’s ear.

According to the Hill, of the 13 judicial nominees confirmed since President Trump took office, 10 are either current or formerFederalist Society members or regular speakers at its events.

The organization describes itself as “a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order”, and operates on the premise that “law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology”. Clarence Thomas, Jeff Sessions and the late Antonin Scalia are among the society’s more well-known alumni.

The non-partisan American Bar Association, which for decades had offered the White House its opinion on the qualifications of nominees was removed from the process by Trump in favor of Federalist Society influence. So far they have rated four of Trump’s nominees unqualified, four more than they ever did under the previous administration.

Thus far the Republican-controlled Senate judiciary committee has been little more than a rubber stamp for Trump’s nominees, having advanced all of his picks through hearings so far. This drew scorn from Democratic committee member Sheldon Whitehouse who earlier this month called the hearings “a joke” and complained that candidates had been studiously coached on “how to withstand all of five minutes of questioning by senators”.

Trump also inherited a massive cache of over 100 judicial openings when he came into office, more than twice that of his predecessor Obama in 2009. That’s because, even as Trump has routinely lambasted Democrats as the party of obstruction, it was Republicans for most of Barack Obama’s term who slowed the confirmation of judicial nominees to a slow crawl. Since his inauguration the number of openings has grown to more than 160 – that’s about half the 323 regional federal judges Obama nominated and had confirmed during his full eight years in office, and Trump has only been in office for 10 months.

It is true that, even as Republicans have picked up the pace of confirmations, Trump cannot fill all those 160 openings overnight. But after sweeping Democratic election wins in races earlier this month, anxious conservatives are going to start pushing Trump to get as many nominees as possible through before the 2018 midterms.

“Obviously, who gets nominated and the pace of confirmations … changes dramatically if the Senate were to flip back to the Democrats,” said John Malcolm, a former justice department lawyer and now an analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. Republicans “should be paying particular attention to pushing through as many nominees as they can”.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-voter-fraud-commission-dunlap-lawsuit

Democratic member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity filed suit**against the commission in federal court in Washington, D.C. on Thursday morning, alleging that its Republican leadership has intentionally excluded him from deliberations and violated federal transparency laws. The commission has been sued more times (eight, including the new filing) than it has officially convened for meetings (two times).

The suit, filed by Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, accuses the commission of violating the Federal Advisory Commission Act, which, among other things, requires that advisory committees be bipartisan and sets transparency requirements for them. “Everything we are doing is absolutely perpendicular to that,” Dunlap charged in an interview. “We aren’t inviting the public to participate. We aren’t transparent. And we aren’t even working together at all. My real fear is that this commission will offer policy recommendations that have not been properly vetted by all of the commissioners.”

The complaint contends Dunlap “has been, and continues to be, blocked from receiving Commission documents necessary to carry out his responsibilities” despite repeated requests to be included. It asserts that Dunlap is moving forward with the lawsuit “reluctantly” in order to prevent the commission from “becoming exactly the kind of one-sided, partisan undertaking the Federal Advisory Committee Act was designed to prohibit.”

The commission shouldn’t be surprised by the suit, said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, an advocacy group that is representing Dunlap in the suit. Dunlap has written to the commission multiple times, asking them to address his grievances. “We think the commission is on more than enough notice they are not living up to their obligations,” Evers said, adding that he hopes to avoid a protracted legal battle.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Kris Kobach, the commission’s co-chair and the Republican secretary of state for Kansas, called Dunlap’s lawsuit “baseless and paranoid.” The statement asserted that the commission’s work has been “stalled” by lawsuits, the arrest of a staff member on child pornography charges, and the death of one commissioner. "It is not at all surprising that Commission staff were very busy during this period,” the statement noted "Ironically, Dunlap's lawsuit is only going to increase the workload faced by Commission staff and Department of Justice Attorneys."

Kobach’s statement addressed just a small number of Dunlap’s allegations. For example, it asserted that it was “incorrect” that Kobach excluded Dunlap from communications “between September 12 and October 17”; the bulk of Dunlap’s complaints predate that period. For example, email records filed with a federal court by the Department of Justice show Kobach repeatedly discussedcommission business in June with a handful of people without including other commissioners. Most notably, Kobach drafted a controversial letter to statesrequesting publicly available voter rolls with input from Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams, two Republicans who only joined the commission afterwards. Those discussions didn’t include other commissioners.

Dunlap asserted that the remainder of the commission was made aware of Kobach’s intent to send the letter only hours before states received copies. The suit claims this “deprived Secretary Dunlap of the opportunity to consult with other members of the Commission or to formulate and express his views as to the legality or propriety of this action.”

Dunlap asked Andrew Kossack, the executive director of the commission, for copies of this and other correspondence in a letter on Oct. 17 and again in a follow-up email on Nov. 1. Dunlap asserted that he has not been provided anything in response.

In a statement, Kossack said Dunlap’s lawsuit “has no merit and we look forward to refuting it in court.” He said he was “disappointed that Mr. Dunlap has chosen conflict over working cooperatively in a bipartisan manner to achieve the important goals of this commission.” He did not respond when asked why he had not given Dunlap the documents he’d asked for prior to filing the suit.

Among the other claims in the suit are contentions that the commission’s record-retention practices are lax and its use of personal email accounts presents data security risks.

Dunlap, who said he was unaware of any such meeting, emailed Kossack on Oct. 25 to ask who had invited the group. Kossack, whose job is to run the commission’s operations, stated that he didn’t know. “I have never communicated with this group, and no meeting is scheduled for December,” he wrote in an Oct. 27 email to Dunlap, a copy of which was provided to ProPublica. Said Dunlap: “If the executive director of this commission doesn’t know what his commissioners are planning, that’s a sign of bigger problems. I think that really means we’ve gone off the rails.” (The Minnesota Voters Alliance has not responded to questions from ProPublica.)The suit also claims the commission has not communicated with Dunlap since it last met in mid-September, including about plans for any future meetings. However, other commissioners and even outside groups have spoken publicly about such plans. On Oct. 19, for example, the conservative Minnesota Voters Alliance announced in a fundraising email that it had been “invited to speak at the December 2017 meeting of the ‘Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.’”

Finally, Dunlap’s suit claims the commission’s purported bipartisanship is just “a facade,” a contention Dunlap has repeatedly made since the release of a now notorious email penned by von Spakovsky in February. “There isn’t a single Democratic official that will do anything other than obstruct any investigation of voter fraud,” von Spakovsky wrote, adding that if Democrats or “mainstream Republicans” were named to the commission, it would be an “abject failure.”

In a recent interview with The Hill, von Spakovsky defended the email, asserting it was part of a “private conversation.” He also stated that he believes he is getting along with the Democrats on the commission. “So far, at least, it seems like we’ve worked well together,” he said.

Countered Dunlap: “I just laughed when I read that. We aren’t working together at all.”

Filed under:

The Trump Administration

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/georgia-election-server-wiped

computer server that was used to store key elections data in the state of Georgia was completely wiped earlier this year after voting rights advocates filed a suit against Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

The *Associated Press* reports that the server’s data was destroyed this past July by unnamed technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which is responsible for running Georgia’s entire elections system. What’s more, two backup servers were also wiped completely clean in August, which was right around the time when a lawsuit against Kemp moved to federal court.

The lawsuit, which the AP says was filed shortly before the data server was wiped, was filed to end the state’s current voting infrastructure, which the plaintiffs claim is far too vulnerable to fraud and tampering. Among other things, the lawsuit notes that the state’s 27,000 AccuVote touchscreen voting machines do not offer paper receipts and are vulnerable to hacking.

“The server data could have revealed whether Georgia’s most recent elections were compromised by malicious hackers,” the AP notes. “The plaintiffs contend that the results of both last November’s election and a special June 20 congressional runoff— won by Kemp’s predecessor, Karen Handel — cannot be trusted.”

Kemp’s office claims that it had nothing to do with the center’s decision to wipe the server, despite the fact that center answers directly to Kemp. However, at this point it is not clear who ordered both the primary server and the backup servers wiped clean of data.

But Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer scientist, tells the AP that this should raise suspicions of some kind of foul play going on behind the scenes.

“People who have nothing to hide don’t behave this way,” he said.

ari berman interview give us the ballot

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-16-2017/

history to pres

see kk kobach

see new black panthers

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/voter-id-suppressed-vote-exactly-wisconsin-republicans-predicted

mary b cmd

Anew study of registered voters in Dane and Milwaukee Counties who did not vote in the 2016 presidential election found that approximately 17,000-23,000 eligible voters in those counties were prevented or deterred from voting by Wisconsin’s voter ID law. Due to financial constraints, the social scientists were only able to do a study of two of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, but the authors say that extrapolating statewide as many as 45,000 people stayed home because of the law.

Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin by only 22,000 votes, the first GOP presidential victory in the state since Ronald Regan in 1984. The shocking upset garnered national attention and helped deliver the electoral college to Trump as the popular vote went to Clinton.

The study, conducted by Ken Mayer and Michael G. DeCrescenzo, at the University of Wisconsin Department of Political Science, provides definitive evidence that the controversial voter ID bill, passed in 2011 and held up in the courts until 2016, worked precisely as Wisconsin Republicans intended — to make it more difficult for targeted voters to cast their ballots.

Although voter preferences were not included in the study, the survey documents that the burdens of voter ID fell disproportionately on low-income and minority populations considered likely to support Democrats. Among low-income registrants (household income under $25,000), 21.1% were deterred, compared to 7.2% for those whose household income was over $25,000. 8.3% of white registrants were deterred, compared to 27.5% of African Americans.

Roughly 80% of registrants who were deterred from voting by the law, and 77% of those actually prevented from voting, cast ballots in the 2012 election. The number of voters negatively impacted is far greater than the number of “fraud” cases the law was designed to stop. When the law was challenged in federal court and initially ruled a violation of the Voting Rights Act, the state failed to present a single case of voter impersonation that the law would have prevented.

The results prompted the county clerks from Milwaukee and Madison to issue strongly worded statements and a call for a suspension of the voter ID law. “I was shocked by the numbers and am furious to see that Jim Crow laws are alive and well,” said Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson.

“The photo ID law must be suspended until changes can be made to restore every voter’s access to the ballot box,” said Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell whose office commissioned the study.

“What I am concerned about here is winning”

While most Republican stuck to the official talking points that the photo ID law was all about preventing nonexistent “voter fraud,” some forgot the script.

On the night of Wisconsin’s 2016 presidential primary, Republican Congressman Glenn Grothman (R-WI) flatly stated in an interview with WTMJ’s Charles Benson that Wisconsin’s photo ID law would help the GOP win Wisconsin in the November 2016 election.

When asked about the fact that Wisconsin has consistently voted for Democrats in recent presidential elections, Grothman assured Bensen that Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton was a “weak candidate,” then added “and now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is gonna make a little bit of a difference as well.”

Rep. Grothman was a State Senator in 2011 when Wisconsin debated and passed its voter ID law, so he was privy to the back room conversations and dealings on the issue.

Those back room conversation came to light five years later when the bill was implemented and people immediately started having problems. Former GOP staffer turned coffee shop owner, Todd Albaugh, was frustrated when one of his employees could not vote in the 2016 spring elections and decided to blow the whistle.

“I was in a closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters. Think about that for minute. Elected officials panning and happy to help deny a fellow American’s constitutional right to vote in order to increase their own chances to hang onto power.”Albaugh, who once worked for Wisconsin Senator Dale Shultz (R-Richland Center), stated in a social media post:

“A vigorous debate on the ideas wasn’t good enough,” said Albaugh “they had to take the coward’s way out and come up with a plan to suppress the vote under the guise of ‘voter fraud.'”

Later on the witness stand in a lawsuit brought by One Wisconsin Now challenging the voter ID law, Albaugh described the tension in closed door caucus as provisions in the bill were being debated.

As described by the *Milwaukee Journal Sentinel*, Albaugh testified that Committee Chair Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) made the case for passing the bill, which made it much harder for students, the elderly and the poor to vote:

“She got up out of her chair and hit her fist or her finger on the table and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to think about what this would mean for the neighborhoods around Milwaukee and the college campuses,” Allbaugh said.

“Grothman said, ‘What I’m concerned about here is winning, and that’s what really matters here. … We better get this done quickly while we have the opportunity,'” Allbaugh said.

Allbaugh named two other senators — Leah Vukmir and Randy Hopper — as being gleeful over passing the bill.

“They were politically frothing at the mouth,” he said of Vukmir and Hopper, who lost a recall election a few months after the voter ID law passed.

ALEC Members Toe the Koch Party Line

All four of the legislators named by Albaugh were at the time members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Leah Vukmir, described as “frothing at the mouth” over the bill, served for years as an officer of ALEC, was ALEC’s national chairman in 2016, and was given ALEC’s “Iron Woman” Award in 2017.

The Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) drafted and approved a “model” “Voter ID Act” in August of 2009. The wave of bills that followed were constructed differently by different GOP legislatures, but have a common purpose to disenfranchise constituencies that are more likely to vote Democratic.

ALEC has attempted to distance itself from this ugly history of voter suppression (it did away with its “Public Safety and Elections Task Force” and no longer touts voter ID as a “model bill”) after sustained campaigning by the online civil rights group Color of Change and others, but ALEC has done nothing to get voter ID policies repealed in the states where its members pushed for and passed the bill.

The partisan motivation behind the Voter ID Act comports with vision of ALEC’s founder, the late Paul Weyrich of Wisconsin, who in 1980 told a group of religious fundamentalists: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/09/08/right-wing-medias-new-voter-fraud-proof-even-more-asinine-usual/217887

Right-wing media's new voter fraud "proof" is even more asinine than usual

Research ››› September 8, 2017 3:34 PM EDT ››› ZACHARY PLEAT

Right-wing and fringe media outlets and figures, including Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Trump administration’s election integrity commission, are citing a Washington Times article about several thousand New Hampshire voters using out-of-state driver’s licenses to register to vote to bolster conservative claims of fraud and say that Republicans may have actually won the state. But journalists and election experts shot down these claims of voter fraud and explained that New Hampshire’s voter ID law permits out-of-state driver’s licenses to be used as proof of identity when voting,an option that college students often exercise.

Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

Conservative and fringe media figures: Out-of-state driver’s licenses used to vote in New Hampshire prove voter fraud against Republicans

Wash. Timesused data of voters registering with out-of-state driver’s licenses in New Hampshire to promote conservative claims of voter fraud. A September 7 Washington Times article published information released by a New Hampshire Republican showing that “more than 6,500 people registered to vote in New Hampshire on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses” to bolster conservative claims of voter fraud. While admitting that these statistics “don’t prove those accusations,” the Times wrote that “they do corroborate them,” citing further data that more than 5,000 of those voters haven’t yet obtained a New Hampshire license or vehicle registration:

More than 6,500 people registered to vote in New Hampshire on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses, and since then the vast majority have neither obtained an in-state license nor registered a motor vehicle.

Conservatives say the state’s same-day registration is an invitation for fraud because of loose proof-of-residence rules.

New Hampshire House Speaker Shawn Jasper, a Republican, issued the numbers Thursday based on inquiries he made to the Department of State, which oversees elections, and the Department of Safety.

Since Election Day, Republicans have charged that a significant number of nonresident Democrats, principally from Massachusetts, flowed into New Hampshire to vote illegally, tilting a close race to their party.

“Having worked before on a campaign in New Hampshire, I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It’s very real. It’s very serious. This morning, on this show, is not the venue for me to lay out all the evidence,” White House policy adviser Stephen Miller told ABC News in February.

Though Mr. Jasper’s findings don’t prove those accusations, they do corroborate them.

[...]

New Hampshire law gives drivers 60 days upon establishing residence to obtain a state license.

But more than 80 percent of voters who registered on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses, or 5,313 of them, neither had a state license nor registered a motor vehicle almost 10 months later. [The Washington Times, 9/7/17]

Breitbart.com’s Kris Kobach cited the data in the Wash. Times article as “proof” of “fraudulent votes” in New Hampshire and claimed Hillary Clinton and Sen. Maggie Hassan may have fraudulently won the state. Kris Kobach, Kansas’ secretary of state, vice chairman of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission, and a paid Breitbart.com columnist, cited the Washington Times article as “proof” of voter fraud in New Hampshire in his September 7 column:

It has long been reported, anecdotally, that out-of-staters take advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration and head to the Granite State to cast fraudulent votes. Now there’s proof.

According to statistics released by the Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, on the date of the general election in November 2016, there were 6,540 same-day registrants who registered to vote in New Hampshire using an out-of-state driver’s license to prove their identity. In and of itself, that doesn’t prove that any fraud occurred – theoretically, each of those individuals could have been someone who recently moved to the State and had not yet had time to get a New Hampshire driver’s license. According to New Hampshire law, a new resident has 60 days to obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license.

So if those 6,540 voters were bona fide New Hampshire residents, they would get their driver’s license no later than January 7, 2017. However, the numbers tell a very different story. It turns out that, as of August 30, 2017 – nearly ten months after the election – only 1,014 of the 6,540 same-day registrants who registered with an out-of-state license had obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license. The other 5,526 individuals never obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license. And, of those 5,526, only 213 registered a vehicle in New Hampshire.

So 5,313 of those voters neither obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license nor registered a vehicle in New Hampshire. They have not followed the legal requirements for residents regarding driver’s licenses, and it appears that they are not actually residing in New Hampshire. It seems that they never were bona fide residents of the State.

5,513 is a big number – more than enough to swing two very important elections. The closest major election was the contest between incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte and challenger Maggie Hassan (D). Hassan won the election by a razor-thin margin of 1,017 votes. Those 5,313 fraudulent votes were more than enough to swing the election. If 59.2 percent or more of them went for Hassan, then the election was stolen through voter fraud. That’s likely, since the surrounding states are Democrat strongholds.

It’s also possible that New Hampshire’s four electoral college votes were swung to Hillary Clinton through illegal voting by nonresidents. Clinton won New Hampshire by only 2,732 votes. If 74.8 percent of the 5,513 fraudulent votes were cast for Clinton, then the presidential election in New Hampshire was tipped as well. [Breitbart.com, 9/7/17]

FoxNews.com: “Out-of-staters may have won New Hampshire for Clinton.” A September 8 FoxNews.com article cited the Washington Times report, saying the data it included “could potentially call into question the validity of the New Hampshire results for Nov. 8, when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton outpolled Republican nominee Donald Trump by a mere 2,736 votes.” [FoxNews.com, 9/8/17]

Gateway Pundit: “VOTE FRAUD: More Than 5,000 Out-of-State Hillary Voters May have Tipped New Hampshire Against Trump.” Right-wing fringe website Gateway Pundit cited the Washington Times story to scream “VOTE FRAUD” in the headline of a September 7 post, which claimed: “It is well known that people are bussed in to vote in New Hampshire. This is why the Democrats are fiercely working to stop any investigation into vote fraud and are working to prevent any type of voter I.D. laws. Strict laws would have tipped New Hampshire in Donald Trump’s favor.” [The Gateway Pundit, 9/7/17]

WND: “New Evidence Backs Trump Vote-Fraud Claim.” Conspiracy theory website WorldNetDaily cited the Washington Times story in a September 7 post to claim, “The discovery that more than 6,000 people used out-of-state driver’s licenses to vote in New Hampshire last November bolsters Donald Trump’s claim he lost the state because thousands of Massachusetts residents came in to vote.” [WorldNetDaily, 9/7/17]

Drudge Report:“PAPER: 5,000 out-of-state voters may have tipped NH…”

DRUDGE REPORT @DRUDGE_REPORT

9/17

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/kris-kobachs-breathtakingly-dishonest-claim-about-voter-fraud-in-new-hampshire/

voter suppression, going national

Trump also announced this week that he is forming an election commission, which is aiming at expanding voter suppression tactics that were crucial for Republicans in swing states in 2016. The very idea is "voter fraud" has been debunked by experts time and time again. This is particularly worrisome since local media can often get this story wrong. Bottom line: No matter what conservative hacks say, "voter fraud" is just a pretext for voter suppression. In reality, we should be working on ways to make it easier for people to vote.

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/republican-efforts-hijack-voting-and-rig-elections-seen-full-force-week

The Republican Party’s efforts to disrupt voting and thwart representative government was on full display this past week, when despite ridicule in the press, the GOP's leading proponents of undermining voters and rigging elections were unbowed and forged ahead.

First came Kris Kobach’s willfully incorrect—but headline-grabbing—accusation on Breitbart.com that more than 5,000 people illegally voted last fall in New Hampshire, delivering an Electoral College majority to Hillary Clinton and a U.S. senate seat to a Democrat. Kobach, an attorney whose anti-immigrant activism launched his career, is the Kansas secretary of state, a current gubernatorial candidate, and co-chair of President Trump’s Orwellian-titled "election integrity" commission. Kobach was caught mangling some Republican-produced data about New Hampshire college students who were perfectly legal voters to make his false claim about presumed Democrats voting illegally.

Kobach’s antipathy toward non-natives voting is nothing new. He has been repeatedly sued in Kansas over adding qualifications to the state voter registration form, including targeting out-of-staters who have moved there. That creates new barriers to vote in local and state elections. Kobach’s anti-democratic partisanship was in sync with another clumsy display this week from another outspoken voter suppressor on Trump’s election panel, Hans von Spakovsky. Now at The Heritge Foundation, von Spakovsky led the second Bush administration’s voter fraud crusade at the Justice Department, and was caught lying about his email lobbying to keep Democrats from being on Trump’s panel.

Trump’s election commission keeps getting clownish grades for its antics.This week’s New Hampshire field hearing invited only white men to testify, prompting ridicule. Members were caught communicating via private emails for official business—the same thing right-wingers went crazy about when Hillary Clinton did it. But Kobach didn’t backtrack on his voter fraud claims and von Spakovsky didn’t resign. No, they forged ahead with the panel’s real goal: to impede any citizen who doesn’t support the GOP from voting, even as fellow panel members publicly chastised them for it.

That brings us to this week’s most notorious witness who testified before the panel in a New Hampshire field hearing. In recent years, John Lott has made more of a name as a firearms fanatic than as a voting rights crusader. But he testified that anyone registering to vote should undergo the same background checks as are needed to get a firearms permit. That too, was ridiculed in the press as a false equivalency, because the legal requirements to be an eligible voter are not the same as for being a gun owner.

However, what nobody mentioned in news reports was perhaps the most salient detail about Lott’s proposal that would appeal to Republican vote suppressors. Gun licenses aren’t issued to people with criminal records, which if applied to voting, could greatly expand today’s current landscape of felon disenfranchisement. In Virginia, Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe has been fighting with the GOP and its red-led legislature over McAuliffe’s efforts to restore voting rights to nearly 200,000 ex-felons who completed their sentences, probation and parole. In Florida, a state that permanently bans former felons from voting, an estimated 10 percent of the state’s residents—1.6 million people—have lost their voting rights this way.

It’s easy enough to be dismissive of Kobach, von Spakovsky and Lott, but they are playing a very serious game, burrowing into the fine print and corners of the voting process to find and exploit ways to rig the rules. You may say there’s nothing new about such partisanship; that’s politics. But the harm this ilk poses to representative government and the stakes for citizens are enormous.

Yet another example this week showed that the GOP is willing to rewrite the rules when it comes to the democratic process, if that’s what it takes for them to win. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he wants to end a process where home-state senators must approve any federal judicial nominee in their state. Blue state senators have been opposing Trump’s nomination of right-wingers to lifetime appointments.

McConnell blocked President Obama’s final U.S. Supreme Court nomination, and stalled Senate action on federal appeals and district court seats—hoping a Republican victory last November would result in a federal judiciary turning toward the right for decades. Currently, there are 144 federal court vacancies. In this case, McConnell is trying to press the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, Iowa’s Charles Grassley, to end the so-called “blue slip” practice, where home state senators can veto nominations. Yet again, the GOP is willing to put party before country to win and exercise power.

Steven Rosenfeld

http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/07/25/fierce-push-back-trump-voter-fraud-commission

The Trump administration has set up what Trump calls a “voter fraud panel.” Billed as an official “Advisory Commission on Election Integrity Resources,” the commission is being met with stiff resistance from many states, lawsuits by civil rights, and privacy watchdogs, and it is even prompting some worried voters to take the names off the voter rolls.

The origins of this commission come from Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that “millions” of people voted “illegally” in the 2016 election, all of them for his opponent. In a November 27, 2016 tweet, Trump claimed, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Even though scientific studies have repeatedly shown voter fraud to be insignificant in campaigns and elections, a week later he claimed that 3-5 million had voted illegally, all against him.

Trump’s panel is packed with Republicans who have repeatedly questioned the integrity of U.S. elections or have actively promoted voter suppression measures.

Vice President Mike Pence, Chair. Pence believes that skepticism about voter fraud is “well founded.”
Kris Kobach, Vice-Chair, Kansas Secretary of State. The ACLU has dubbed him the “King of Voter suppression.”
Hans Von Spakovsky, was dubbed the “Dark Prince of Voter Fraud Alarmism” by Slateand is the author of books on voter fraud.
Ken Blackwell, former Ohio Secretary of State, was sued by the state’s citizens for his handling of the vote count in the 2004 Presidential election after the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush.
Connie Lawson, Indiana Secretary of State, helped write Indiana’s voter ID law, which became a national “model” through the American Legislative Exchange Council.

According to the ACLU: “The Commission was established for the purpose of providing a veneer of legitimacy to President Trump’s false claim that he won the popular vote in the 2016 election once millions of supposedly illegal votes are subtracted from the count. That purpose is evident in the composition of the Commission, which is stacked with individuals who have endorsed the President’s false statements about the popular vote, and the fact that no provisions whatsoever have been made to insulate the Commission’s advice and recommendations from inappropriate influence by the person who appointed the Commission’s members i.e., President Trump himself.”

KRIS KOBACH PROMOTES FLAWED “CROSSCHECK” PROGRAM

President Donald Trump established the commission by executive order on May 11. On June 28, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice chair of the commission, sent a letter to all 50 states and the District of Columbia asking them to submit data from their voter rolls, including voters’ political party affiliations and voting histories from 2006 onwards, as well as voters’ names, addresses and dates of birth.

If Kobach’s name rings a bell it should. Kobach, is the nation’s primary proponent of a “Muslim Registry” and famously arrived for an interview with Trump with diagrams under his arm explaining how to get it done. Kobach was also involved in the creation of Arizona’s SB 1070 crack down on illegal immigrants and he has taken credit for Trump’s “the Mexicans will pay for the wall” promise.

Kobach is the nation’s most vocal proponent of the “Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program” known as “Crosscheck.” Even before the Commission’s request, huge problems with Crosscheck were already being revealed.

Author Greg Palast expose The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters for Rolling Stone detailed the enormous flaws with a system that can’t take into account common names, middle names, fathers and sons, etc. and produces hugely inflated numbers of “problem” voters. For the state of Virginia for instance Crosscheck produced a list of 400,000 voters whose names allegedly appeared on the lists of other states. If Virginia acted to purge those voters, it could have an enormous impact on elections. Fortunately states have begun to drop out of Crosscheck due to its methodological problems.

Mark Swedlund, a database expert, analyzed what is known about Crosscheck and concluded that Crosscheck’s “childish methodology” disproportionately targets minority voters, those most likely to vote for Democrats. “I can’t tell you what the intent was. I can only tell you what the outcome is. And the outcome is discriminatory against minorities.” Swedlund told Palast.

Of course Kobach seems unconcerned by the fact that many in Donald Trump’s inner circle are registered to vote in numerous states.

STATES ARE FIGHTING BACK

States are refusing to turn over voter rolls to the Pence-Kobach commission. NBC reported that the states are fighting back:

“Nineteen states — both red and blue — and D.C. are flat-out refusing to comply with the request, citing privacy concerns and some claiming the 15-member vote fraud panel is politically-motivated. Twenty-six states said they plan to only hand over only what is deemed public information by their respective state laws, while five states have yet to receive the commission’s request or are still reviewing it, according to a count by NBC News.”

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) was one of more than 100 groups that jointly called on Secretaries of State to reject this request for sensitive voter data and many Secretaries of State are sounding the alarm.

Delbert Hosemann, Republican Secretary of State of Mississippi said, “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.” Alison Lundergan Grimes, Democratic Secretary of State of Kentucky said, “There’s not enough bourbon here in Kentucky to make this request seem sensible.”

In response, President Trump suggested that the long list of states refusing to turn over personal voter data to the commission have something to hide.

LEGAL EXPERTS ARE FIGHTING BACK

Legal experts are fighting back on a number of grounds, using federal open government laws, and privacy laws and the U.S. Constitution to argue that a federal national voter data base kept by the Army is not really what the founders intended.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the administration, saying the commission is in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which requires such committees to have open meetings, chartering, public involvement and reporting. The ACLU complaint says:

“Defendants have violated FACA in two respects … The Pence-Kobach Commission has already held its first meeting without public notice; without making that meeting open to the public; and without timely notice in the Federal Register.”

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Lawyers’ Committee) has also filed suit on FACA-violation grounds, because of the commission’s “failure to disclose communications and make its meetings open to the public.”

Additionally the Lawyers’ Committee complaint states, “The Commission’s request for voter data, and its operation more broadly, already is causing significant harm. There have been widespread reports of voters canceling their voter registrations out of fear of what the Commission will do with their personal information. For instance, Colorado officials have reported a 2,150 percent increase in registration cancellations since the Kobach letter was sent.”

Corey Hutchins of the Colorado Independent reports: ‘confusion,’ ‘hysteria,’ and voters unregistering at some local election offices.

Earlier this week, in the office of Boulder’s election division, workers were keeping a tally on sticky notes when voters started calling to cancel their registration or to become so-called confidential voters.

Since Monday, according to official counts, the office has seen 270 of its voters cancel their registration. About 70 have asked for confidential status, in which they sign an affidavit saying they feel their safety is at risk.

It’s not just Colorado. In Florida the Orlando Sentinel reports that, Worried voters try to ‘unregister’ after Trump voter-roll request. Ian Millhiser writes at Think Progress, in Trump ‘voter fraud’ squad may already be tricking voters into taking themselves off the rolls, that “It’s almost as if disenfranchising people is the whole point.”

Public Citizen also filed a complaint, this one raising serious privacy concerns about a national voter database maintained by the U.S. military. The commission is asking that states upload the information to the Department of the Army’s Safe Access File Exchange (SAFE) website.

“The federal government should not be compiling information about citizens’ political affiliations and their exercise of the right to vote,” said Public Citizen President Robert Weissman.

“Americans are right to be worried about who will gain access to the data and how it will be used. There is little doubt that the overriding purpose of the data collection effort, and of the deceptively named Commission on Election Integrity itself, is to intimidate voters, particularly people of color, and to suppress voting on a massive scale.”

Public Citizen’s complaint says Department of the Army’s Safe Access File Exchange (SAFE) website violates the Privacy Act, which “prohibits any agency from collecting, using, maintaining, or disseminating records describing how any individual exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.”

The far right has long been aware that the more extreme their ideas, the harder it is for them to be passed into law. As ever more right-wing Republicans dominate 32 state houses, countless voter suppression measures have been introduced.

Paul Wyrick, a founding father of the “conservative movement” laid out the blue print way back in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote… our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting.”

ABOUT DAVE C. JOHNSON

Dave C. Johnson is a Sr. Fellow with Campaign for America's Future (a project of People's Action). He is a frequent contributor to progressive media, including radio appearances. Prior to this he was in the tech industry of Silicon Valley.

All articles by Dave C. Johnson

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/10/headlines/report_wisconsins_voter_id_law_suppressed_200_000_votes_in_presidential_election

new report has called into question whether President Trump would have actually won Wisconsin during the 2016 presidential election without the state’s strict voter ID law. The study published by the progressive advocacy group Priorities USA says the law suppressed the votes of more than 200,000 residents—the majority of whom were African-American and Democratic-leaning. President Trump won only 22,748 more votes than Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin.

https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsins-voter-id-law-suppressed-200000-votes-trump-won-by-23000/

no link

Prior to the 2016 election, Eddie Lee Holloway Jr., a 58-year-old African-American man, moved from Illinois to Wisconsin, which implemented a strict voter-ID law for the first time in 2016. He brought his expired Illinois photo ID, birth certificate, and Social Security card to get a photo ID for voting in Wisconsin, but the DMV in Milwaukee rejected his application because the name on his birth certificate read “Eddie Junior Holloway,” the result of a clerical error when it was issued. Holloway ended up making seven trips to different public agencies in two states and spent over $200 in an attempt to correct his birth certificate, but he was never able to obtain a voter ID in Wisconsin. Before the election, his lawyer for the ACLU told me Holloway was so disgusted he left Wisconsin for Illinois.

Holloway’s story was sadly familiar in 2016. According to federal court records, 300,000 registered voters, 9 percent of the electorate, lacked strict forms of voter ID in Wisconsin. A new study by Priorities USA, shared exclusively with The Nation, shows that strict voter-ID laws, in Wisconsin and other states, led to a significant reduction in voter turnout in 2016, with a disproportionate impact on African-American and Democratic-leaning voters. Wisconsin’s voter-ID law reduced turnout by 200,000 votes, according to the new analysis. Donald Trump won the state by only 22,748 votes.

The study compared turnout in states that adopted strict voter-ID laws between 2012 and 2016, like Wisconsin, to states that did not.

While states with no change to voter identification laws witnessed an average increased turnout of +1.3% from 2012 to 2016, Wisconsin’s turnout (where voter ID laws changed to strict) dropped by -3.3%. If turnout had instead increased by the national no-change average, we estimate that over 200,000 more voters would have voted in Wisconsin in 2016.

This reduction in turnout particularly hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The lost voters skewed more African-American and more Democrat. For example, Wisconsin’s 2016 electorate was 6.1% more Republican, and 5.7% less Democrat, than the group of ‘lost voters’. Furthermore, the WI electorate was 3.7% more White and 3.8% less African American than the group of ‘lost voters.’ This analysis suggests that the 200,000 lost voters would have both been more racially diverse and have voted more Democratic.

(Priorities USA is a progressive advocacy group and Super PAC that supported Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2012. The study was conducted by Civis Analytics, a data science firm founded by the chief analytics officer for Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.)

Though Wisconsin saw the most dramatic reduction in turnout among voter-ID states, it was reflective of a worrisome broader national trend.

In states where the voter identification laws did not change between ’12 and ’16, turnout was up +1.3%. In states where ID laws changed to non-strict (AL, NH, RI) turnout increased less, and was only up by +0.7%. In states where ID laws changed to strict (MS, VA, WI) turnout actually decreased by – 1.7%.

The drop in turnout in these six states led to 400,000 fewer votes relative to turnout in states where ID laws did not change. In Mississippi, Virginia, and Wisconsin, strict voter-ID laws had an especially pronounced negative impact on African-American voters.

In counties where African Americans make up less than 10% of the population AND there were no changes to voter ID laws, 2016 turnout was up +1.9% from 2012, but in similar <10% African American counties where ID laws changed to be strict, total turnout decreased by -0.7%. In counties where African Americans make up more than 40% of the population, however, 2016 turnout was down -2.2% from 2012 in states where ID laws did not change, but down -5 points in states where ID laws changed to be strict.

The study also compared turnout in Wisconsin to Minnesota, which has very similar demographics but no voter-ID law, and found “turnout in African-American counties dropped off at significantly higher levels than in their Minnesota-counterparts.”

It’s important to note that this study was conducted by a Democratic Party–affiliated group and has not been peer-reviewed or gone through the typical academic vetting process. While some studies have shown big reductions in turnout among minority voters because of voter-ID laws, others have not. But the Priorities USA study is consistent with a 2014 study by the Government Accountability Office, which found that strict voter-ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee reduced turnout by 2 percent, enough to swing a close election, with the largest drop-off among newly registered voters, young voters, and voters of color.

This study provides more evidence for the claim that voter-ID laws are designed not to stop voter impersonation fraud, which is virtually nonexistent, but to make it harder for certain communities to vote. This matters greatly today, because 87 bills to restrict access to the ballot have been introduced in 29 states this year, including voter-ID laws in 19 states. Arkansas and Iowa have already passed strict voter-ID laws in 2017.

“Americans’ fundamental right to vote is under attack by Republican governors and state legislatures around the country,” said Guy Cecil, Chairman of Priorities USA. “Under the false pretense of combating voter fraud, Republicans are passing laws that make it more difficult and time-consuming for average citizens to participate in the democratic process.”

fac so 3/17

the country, more than 6 million citizens

http://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/felony-disenfranchisement/

aren't able to vote because of laws preventing those with afelony conviction from casting a ballot. More than 1.7 million, or a quarter of the nation's voters disenfranchised by these laws, live in Florida, the perennial battleground state that also has some of the most restrictive rules barring the franchise from those with a felony record in their past.

African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately affected by these laws, a product of inequities in the criminal justice system. Today, about 21 percent of Florida's voting-age African-American population is kept from voting under the state's harsh rules.

One of them is Desmond Meade (in photo), a 49-year-old in Orlando who is at the center of a growing campaign to shift course in Florida and expand voting rights to those who have served their felony sentences.

Meade has a law degree with Florida International University, and last fall worked on his wife Sheena's unsuccessful run for the Florida House. But one thing he couldn't do is vote for her. Meade applied to have his voting rights restored in 2006, after finishing his sentences for drug possession, and, later, for aggravated assault and possession of a firearm. Florida requires that those seeking to regain voting rights submit a petition to the state's Executive Clemency Board, which includes Gov. Rick Scott (R) and two other members of his cabinet. And Meade is still waiting.

The number of Florida citizens who see their voting rights restored through the process has varied dramatically depending on who is in the governor's office. From 2002 to 2006, the clemency board cleared 72,080 citizens to vote, according to the Florida Commission on Offender Review. Gov. Charlie Crist expedited the process, leading to a surge in votes being restored — up to 155,315 between 2007 and 2010. But Gov. Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi ushered in new restrictions on the process in 2011; between 2011 and 2014, the number of citizens with voting rights restored plummeted to 1,534.

"When you look at the number of individuals whose rights have been restored over the last six years, I mean, it's depressing, considering 47 other states allow people to vote after they've served their time," Meade said in an interview last November.

===

This year, laws with roots to the Civil War prevented 6.1 million from voting

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/civil-war-laws-prevented-voting/

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-gops-attack-on-voting-rights-was-the-most-under-covered-story-of-2016/

WI 6/16

Voter Suppression Measures on Trial in Walker's Wisconsin

By David Armiak — The second day of a trial over measures implemented by Wisconsin's GOP to restrict voting rights in the state commenced Tuesday in Madison.

ALEC Legislators "Giddy" About Voter Suppression Potential of Voter ID

The expert testimony followed Monday's bombshell statements by Todd Allbaugh, a former Republican staffer who worked for then-Sen. Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center) in 2011 when Voter ID was proposed in Wisconsin.

Back then, Senate elections committee Chair Mary Lazich told the public it was all about preventing voter fraud: "When this bill is finally signed into law, it will provide Wisconsin voters more confidence in the integrity of their elections and will not disenfranchise legitimate voters."

But behind closed doors at a GOP caucus meeting, Albaugh testified that Lazich and other GOP senators were excited at the prospect that Voter ID could prevent some Democratic populations from voting. "She got up out of her chair and she hit her finger on the table and said, 'Hey, we've got to think about what this could mean for the neighborhoods aroundMilwaukee and the college campuses around the state,'" Allbaugh said. Several other senators were "ashen faced" at the discussion.

Allbaugh testified that Sen. Glenn Grothman (now a U.S. Representative), told fellow Republicans, "'What I’m concerned about is winning. You know as well as I do the Democrats would do this if they had power … so we better get this done while we have the opportunity."

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/05/13108/voter-suppression-laws-go-to-trial#sthash.aXiSsLii.dpuf

https://www.propublica.org/article/that-time-i-was-investigated-for-voter-fraud

Here’s how I learned that someone voted as me in the 2012 general election.

On March 26, 2014, three investigators from Maryland’s Office of the State Prosecutor sat at my dining room table and showed me a signature on a photocopy taken from a D.C. poll book. The scrawl looked more like a seismograph reading and was so unrecognizable that it took me a minute to realize that I was looking at it upside down. Turning the picture over didn’t make it much better. “No, that’s not my handwriting,” I told them.

Somebody had clearly voted using my name. But why? And how did state officials figure it out?

Absentee ballot fraud – people violating state laws on the distribution, collection and submission of mail ballots – is the more likely and more commonly prosecuted crime. Even for these kinds of scams, a definitive total of cases is hard to come by since voting records are maintained by several thousand different local governments.In-person voter impersonation is vanishingly rare, as many studies have shown. The claims put forth by Donald Trump that voter fraud in places like Philadelphia could rig the election against him have very little evidence behind them, according to election experts.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, a woman named Linda Earlette Wellscast a provisional ballot in the name of her dead mother in the 2012 election (Wells was a registered Florida voter at the time). After doing so, she called the county’s board of elections and told an employee that she had used her mother’s name and ID to vote and wanted to cancel the ballot. By pleading guilty, Wells was sentenced to probation without a conviction appearing on her record. Hers was one of two cases of voter fraud brought by Maryland authorities since 2012.

I voted early in 2012, because at the time I worked at The New York Times and was expected to be in the newsroom in Manhattan on Election Day. When the investigators came to visit me in 2014, the picture of the poll book they showed me was from a polling place I hadn’t voted in for eight years, having long since moved out of the city and into the nearby Maryland suburbs. Somehow, my name had remained on the D.C. voter rolls, and someone had apparently taken advantage of it.

Voting in someone else’s name is difficult to arrange. You’d need to know that the person you were attempting to vote as was not going to show up themselves, and you’d need that person to live in a jurisdiction where the vote would help elect or defeat someone. D.C. isn’t known for having competitive races, and in 2012 there was one citywide contest – an at-large city council seat – that was less than a blowout. I struggled to think why voting as me would be worth doing, and also how it was possible to do it.

When you move from one state to another (or, in my case, from the District to Maryland), registering to vote in your new jurisdiction creates a new record there, but doesn’t always cancel the old one.

The District does have a process for removing voters who do not vote once every four years from the rolls, but that clearly didn’t happen in my case. Without a national election authority, it’s up to states to find and investigate issues of voter fraud. One way to make that job easier is to keep accurate voter lists, and tools such as online voter registration systems can help. An accurate voter list makes it less likely than mistakes will occur at the polls.

In my case, I registered in Maryland when I got my driver’s license, an option encouraged by the Motor Voter Act, but since Maryland and the District separately maintain voter lists, there was no immediate trigger that caused my D.C. voter registration to be cancelled. I didn’t check, either.

So how did the Maryland investigators know that someone claiming to be Derek Willis appeared to vote in both Maryland and D.C. in 2012? And why did it take them so long to show up at my door?

After each election, local election authorities produce what are known as “voter history” files that show, for a given election, which registered voters actually voted (but not how they voted, of course). These files are public records in most states. Political parties and campaigns often pay vendors to maintain voter files to help them identify and target voters, but members of the public and government officials can also access voter history in most places. In my case, it’s likely that Maryland officials compared their own voter history files to D.C.’s, looking for people with the same name and date of birth or age who appeared on both.

That process doesn’t guarantee that people identified as voting in both jurisdictions are, in fact, the same person. Journalists are familiar with the pitfalls of this kind of “fuzzy matching” based on names and ages. And though we don’t share a birthday or a jump shot, I get mistaken for University of Kentucky basketball forward Derek Willis often enough on social media that I was once invited on a Kentucky radio show to talk about it.

There is no federal government agency that maintains a comprehensive set of voter registration and history records. It’s unlikely that the federal government could even compel states to participate in one; the constitution hands the power to run elections squarely to the states. However, some 20 states and the District of Columbia participate in a data-sharing project called the Electronic Registration Information Center.

The ability to match voter information across state lines is one reason the Maryland investigators showed up at my doorstep. They asked me where I was on Nov. 6, 2012, and whether I had voted in D.C. that day. Once I explained where I had been on Election Day (and was able to provide some evidence of it), the investigators’ interest diminished. When I called the office this fall to find out what, if anything, happened, I was told the case was dropped, and since there was no way to tell who had voted in my name in D.C. that day, there were no other leads to follow.

To be sure, I don’t know if whoever signed my name did so with fraud in mind. He or she could have simply signed in the wrong place in the poll book. It would have been a particularly frustrating crime. Even that “close” at-large city council race was won by nearly 70,000 votes.

This election year, some people claim voter fraud goes under-reported and unprosecuted. The three investigators from the Maryland Office of the State Prosecutor who sat at my dining room table would surely disagree, and a listing of voter fraud cases compiled by the Heritage Foundation from public reports includes instances from dozens of states that involve prison sentences for the perpetrators, albeit involving different kinds of crimes.

After the investigators left my house that day, the first thing I did was call up the D.C. Board of Elections web site to check my voter registration record. By that time, they had finally gotten me off their rolls.

ProPublica is covering ballot access issues in real time with hundreds of partner newsrooms across the country. Follow us on Twitter. If you’re a voter and would like to be a part of Electionland, text ELECTIONLAND to 69866. If you’re a journalist, text “JOURNO” to 69866.

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-state-of-americas-voting-rights-in-one-map/

Center for Media and Democracy / By Brendan Fischer

Scott Walker, ALEC and RNC Lies Unmasked In Court Ruling Tossing Wisconsin's Tough New Voter ID Law

April 30, 2014 |

The political fraud of policing the polls to prevent likely Democratic voters from casting ballots was unmasked by a federal judge in Wisconsin on Tuesday, who struck down that state’s tougher new voter ID law in one of the most forceful federal court rulings of 2014 upholding voting rights.

Federal Judge Lynn Adelman found that Wisconsin’s tougher voter ID law, a pet project of Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his right-wing legislative allies, was not only an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. It also violated Section 2 of the federal 1965 Voting Rights Act based on the its "disproportionate racial impact and discriminatory result" of depriving "the right of Black and Latino citizens to vote on account of race or color."

Wisconsin Republicans, led by Gov. Scott Walker—a 2016 presidential aspirant—said they would appeal. But they will face a very high legal bar to overturn Adelman’s ruling, which was unflinching in its defense of all voters. It's also unlikely an appeal would be resolved before 2014's elections, meaning the law would not be in effect for November's vote

Judge Adelman held that [2] Wisconsin's 2011 Act 23, which narrowed the form of ID required to get a ballot on Election Day, violated the U.S. Constitution by imposing burdens on the voting rights of nearly 300,000 Wisconsin citizens who lack ID -- roughly 9 percent of Wisconsin voters. That outweighed the state’s declared interest in stopping a statistically insignificant rate of voter "fraud."

That finding, together with affirming that the 1965 Voting Rights Act still was a potent anti-discrimination tool—after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a major section of the law in 2013—make the ruling significant on a national level. It cuts to the heart of the debate over voter ID, highlighting the absolute lack of fraud that might justify stricter voter ID laws, and citing extensive testimony showing the very real impact that new polling place policing would have on otherwise eligible voters, many of whom are people of color.

The only type of fraud the voter ID law would prevent is voter impersonation, yet "virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin and it is exceedingly unlikely that voter impersonation will become a problem in Wisconsin in the foreseeable future," Adelman wrote. "A person would have to be insane to commit voter-impersonation fraud."

The GOP War On Non-White Voters

Many of the legitimate votes potentially blocked by Act 23, had the law been upheld, would have been people of color.

Judge Adelman found that Wisconsin's voter ID law violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This is the first decision finding a voter ID law violates Section 2, which prohibits states from imposing a voting restriction that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

Citing extensive evidence that African-American and Latino voters in Wisconsin were between 1.4 times and 2.6 times as likely as white voters to lack a driver's license or photo ID, Judge Adelman found that Act 23 creates a situation "in which a disproportionate share of the Black and Latino populations must shoulder an additional burden in order to exercise the right to vote."

When Republicans passed Wisconsin's restrictive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-inspired legislation in 2011, evidence of the legislation's disproportionate impact on people of color was apparent, and the lack of documented evidence of voter fraud in the state was equally apparent. Yet they pushed forward nonetheless -- and in the wake of court challenges to the legislation, Gov. Walker and Assembly Majority Leader Robin Vos (until recently the ALEC State Chair for Wisconsin) have vowed to call a special session to pass another version of the law.

Yet Judge Adelman noted in his decision that "it is difficult to see how an amendment to the photo ID requirement could remove its disproportionate racial impact and discriminatory result."

Rebuking Right-Wing Voting Vigilante Groups

The decision also contains powerful language countering claims from voter fraud hucksters like True the Vote and politicians like Walker and Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, who have claimed [3] that voter fraud is rampant [4] in Wisconsin and can account for one or two percentage points in Wisconsin elections. Based on extensive evidence and expert testimony, Judge Adelman refuted those claims.

"[C]ases of potential voter-impersonation fraud occur so infrequently that no rational person familiar with the relevant facts could be concerned about them," Judge Adelman wrote. Given that the severe penalties for voter impersonation "are extremely high in comparison to the potential benefits" of one additional vote for a candidate, he wrote, "a person would have to be insane to commit voter-impersonation fraud."

Experts testified that voter ID restrictions do nothing to promote public confidence in the electoral process. In fact, Judge Adelman noted, the way that politicians and right-wing news outlets promote voter ID can actually have the opposite effect, by "creat[ing] the false perception that voter-impersonation fraud is widespread, thereby needlessly undermining the public’s confidence in the electoral process."

“Perhaps the reason why photo ID requirements have no effect on confidence or trust in the electoral process is that such laws undermine the public’s confidence in the electoral process as much as they promote it,” Judge Adelman wrote.

The Judge said that low-income people face barriers to obtaining specific government-issued forms of ID.

"[T]he reason Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately likely to lack an ID," Judge Adelman wrote, is because in Wisconsin "they are disproportionately likely to live in poverty, which in turn is traceable to the effects of discrimination in areas such as education, employment, and housing."

Wisconsin Discrimination Explained

The judge noted that Milwaukee (where the greatest number of Wisconsin's people of color live) is one of the most highly segregated cities in the country. He referenced "one study of the Milwaukee labor market, conducted in the early 2000s, which showed that white job applicants received call-back interviews more than twice as frequently as Black applicants, and that even white applicants with criminal records received call-back interviews more frequently than Black applicants."

Wisconsinites who don't have the forms of ID required under the law faced a complicated, costly, and time-consuming process to obtain the necessary identification, burdens that are more substantial for those with lower incomes than middle- and upper-class citizens. For example, 90 of the 92 Department of Motor Vehicle offices in the state close before 5:00pm, so a person must take time off from work, often foregoing pay, in order to get an ID. Many eligible voters must visit multiple government offices to gather necessary documents like birth certificates, requiring even more time off work. Because those without ID don't drive, they often rely on public transport, which in many cases won't go to the necessary agencies.

Studies show that "even small increases in the costs of voting can deter a person from voting, since the benefits of voting are slight," so these burdens, which disproportionately affect people of color, can have the effect of suppressing the vote.

Wisconsin Voting Rights Activists React

"We are pleased the court ruled on the side of protecting every American's right to vote," said Mike Wilder, co-chair of the Wisconsin African-American Roundtable. "At a time when Big Money and other cheaters are trying to hijack our democracy, it's important we remove the barriers to voting. We need every voice heard for a real democracy."

Wisconsin's GOP establishment quickly reacted by saying that they would appeal the ruling. Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen vowed to do so at the 7th Circuit. However, because the ruling has broken new ground, its fate on appeal is an open question -- although the appeal does become more interesting given that it could appear before 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner, who last December expressed regret [5] for an earlier decision upholding Indiana's voter ID law.

Judge Adelman's decision adds a federal layer to Wisconsin's contentious voter ID battles. A state court blocked the law in 2012 for violating the Wisconsin constitution (three other courts have done the same, most recently in Arkansas. [6]) An appeal of that state court decision was argued before the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this year. However, even if the Wisconsin Supreme Court were to uphold the law, it would remain blocked thanks to Judge Adelman's ruling.

Given the timeline for an appeal of the federal decision, it appears unlikely that voter ID will be in effect for the 2014 elections.