election integrity commission
belated/ redumbent?
SEE MAIN ELECTION INTEGRITY BS
SEE CLETA 3 EI NTWK
SEE TRUMP COUP 2
see kobach
voter suppression
see demon spawn
this is proto-big lie, but // gerry redmap in the works for a while
cleta ginni alec election integrity // leo honest elections pjt
OOPS SHOOING FOR EI NETWK CLETA
3X
Election denial groups and right-wing media figures are talking about their election interference plans as voting begins
Election denial groups have publicly talked about their plans to challenge voter rolls, monitor ballot drop boxes, and recruit and train poll workers to be a “spy in the camp” on Election Day
Written by Payton Armstrong
Research contributions from Media Matters Staff
Published 10/31/24
Election denial groups and some right-wing media figures have been discussing their plans to interfere in the 2024 voting process, building on previous efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and interfere with the 2022 midterm election.
Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, election denial groups and right-wing media figures have discussed their plans to challenge citizens’ right to vote, vowed to monitor drop boxes, claimed to be recruiting and training poll workers, launched apps to track supposed fraud on Election Day, and encouraged activists to monitor for noncitizen voting.
In the 2022 midterm elections, right-wing media supported election denial groups recruiting poll workers and poll watchers and asking for volunteers to monitor ballot drop boxes. These efforts had seemingly grown out of conspiracy theories from former President Donald Trump and right-wing media that the 2020 election was rife with voter fraud and had been stolen, culminating in a violent attempt to overturn the election by storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
As voting begins for the 2024 election, “election officials across the country are ramping up their security measures at polling places,” as reported by NBC News, including “beefing up law enforcement presence to donning bulletproof vests to deploying drones for surveillance amid an increasingly hostile environment.”
Right-wing groups and media figures are encouraging challenges to voter rolls, including asking supporters to flag “suspicious voter[s]” with “Hispanic-sounding last names”
- Election denial group True the Vote has urged followers to submit voter-eligibility complaints by using an app, resulting in thousands of challenges to voter registrations.True the Vote is run by Catherine Engelbrecht and Greg Phillips, who regularly promote the group’s activities in right-wing media. CNN reported: “One of the main drivers of the fruitless challenges is a conservative Texas-based nonprofit group called True the Vote, an election-monitoring organization that has long peddled debunked voter-fraud theories. The group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has called on followers to help clean voter rolls by using an app called IV3 that enables users to research voter data and submit voter-eligibility challenges to local election offices.” CNN, [7/29/24; Media Matters, 1/26/23]
- Cleta Mitchell — who leads the Election Integrity Network and has appeared frequently in right-wing media to promote the group and its activities, and fearmonger about noncitizen voting — was reportedly involved in helping the development of EagleAI for mass voter challenges in various states.As reported by Documented, “Eagle AI draws from public data sources like voter files and newspaper obituaries to build a dashboard for activists to conduct their own ‘list maintenance’ and generate potentially thousands of challenges to voter eligibility with a few clicks.” Documented, [8/17/23; Media Matters, 6/14/24, 10/2/24]
- Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, a coalition of election-denying activists, has reportedly been recruiting people at the state level to “target the registrations of potentially left-leaning voters.”The New Republic reported that the coalition “recruits activists at the state level and trains them to target the registrations of potentially left-leaning voters in an effort to tilt the balance of the electorate toward conservative-leaning voters.” The New Republic, [10/16/24]
- In the last several months, the Ohio chapter of Election Integrity Network has reportedly “mounted a statewide effort to kick thousands of registered voters off the rolls in the runup to the 2024 election.”According to local reporting, at least 13 counties “have received thousands of voter registration challenges, the vast majority of which have been rejected” and that “most of those challenges, the officials say, come from locals identifying themselves as members of the Election Integrity Network.” Cleveland.com, [9/25/24]
- On CBS News, the head of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network encouraged people to flag “Hispanic-sounding last names” for potential voter roll challenges. In an interview with the network, James Womack, head of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, discussed creating a “list of suspicious voters” who may be on the voter rolls in North Carolina. CBS also aired a clip of a video in which Womack also said, “If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered and they’re missing information … and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they've got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter.” Media Matters, [10/22/24; CBS News, 10/21/24]
- On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, the founder of Fight Voter Fraud, Linda Szynkowicz, offered the MAGA audience voter data for mass eligibility challenges in Georgia. “Go to our website, download the request data so you can have a list of people in your county that we believe should not be voting in your county, and you can actually hang on to those,” she said, adding, “Do your due diligence. We’ll even teach you how to do it.” Media Matters, [10/7/24]
- ## Right-wing groups and media figures have been recruiting and training poll workers and observers
- Election Integrity Network claims to have recruited tens of thousands of “election integrity patriots” and holds regular online coordinating calls. The Guardian, [10/21/24]
- Right-wing group Judicial Watch announced that “as part of its ongoing election integrity efforts, its trained observers will monitor polling sites in Wisconsin on November 5.”Judicial Watch President and podcast host Tom Fitton was quoted in the press release saying, “Judicial Watch’s teams will monitor the election in Wisconsin to expose and deter any fraud.” Per Democracy Docket, Judicial Watch is “a right-wing legal group that’s constantly filing all manner of litigation against the government — Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, challenges to immigration policy, attempts to thwart environmental actions and any other issue that riles up Republicans. ‘Judicial Watch’s strategy is simple: Carpet-bomb the federal courts with Freedom of Information Act lawsuits,’ the New York Times wrote of the organization in a 2016 profile.” Judicial Watch, [10/22/24; Democracy Docket, 6/11/24]
* Tea Party Patriots, which sponsored Trump’s January 6 rally, is apparently doing “poll watcher trainings specifically in Georgia” in collaboration with Election Integrity Network.On War Room, election denial figure and Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin claimed her group is also partnering with Turning Point Action and America First Works on door knocking efforts. Martin also described the groups’ efforts in Georgia in a separate interview, saying they are “making sure that poll watchers are recruited and trained.” Media Matters, [9/9/24, 1/30/24]
- Right-wing group VoterGA — co-founded by Garland Favorito, who has fundraised for his election denial organization during appearances on a far-right show — collaborated with the Election Integrity Network on poll-watcher training.CNN reported that “VoterGA, a nonprofit led by a computer consultant-turned-activist named Garland Favorito who has a long history of promoting debunked conspiracy theories, has made inroads with some election officials.” In a phone interview with CNN, “Favorito argued that he and his group are fighting for election integrity and that some state and local officials have sought to cover-up elections malfeasance in Georgia. As an example, he cited his inability to review ballots from the 2020 election,” ignoring that state law requires for the ballots to be sealed after the elections. CNN, [10/9/24; Media Matters, 6/14/23]
- On the Christian nationalist program FlashPoint, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump recruited poll watchers and promoted the RNC’s new “election integrity division” to “ensure that there is no funny business” in the election.During the appearance, Trump said that the RNC is working to stop “3:00 a.m. dumps” and “ballots in suitcases that miraculously appear places,” and she called on the audience to “volunteer to be part of our team, ballot harvest with us where it's legal, you know, be a poll watcher, be a poll worker.” Media Matters, [5/30/24]
- Christian nationalist “prophet” and podcast host Lance Wallnau has been traveling the country on his “Courage Tour” recruiting conservative Christians as poll workers to be a “spy in the camp” on Election Day.During Wallnau’s tour — which recently got a boost from Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) — attendees were directed to a group called Lion of Judah, which ProPublica reported “offers a free course titled ‘Fight the Fraud,’ with modules detailing poll workers’ basic duties and helping people find their local elections offices so they can apply as well as email templates to streamline the process.” Notably, Wallnau has already declared that “there will be cheating” in the 2024 election. ProPublica, [10/16/24; Media Matters, 9/27/24]
- A Turning Point Action member used QAnon supporter Melody Jennings’ podcast to recruit poll workers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.The member, Brett Galaszewski, urged Jennings’ audience to become poll workers and get involved with the Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, Republican Party’s “Election Integrity Committee.” Jennings is an election denier who participated in election denial efforts during the 2022 elections by coordinating attempts to intimidate voters at ballot drop boxes. Jennings even took credit for armed men who staked out drop boxes in Arizona. Media Matters, [11/15/23; The New York Times, 11/1/22]
- Right-wing “Stop the Steal” activist Scott Presler, who has previously pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory, called on Donald Trump Jr.'s Rumble podcast audience to become poll workers and to investigate county voter rolls in Pennsylvania.Media Matters, [9/5/24, 1/30/23]
- ## True the Vote is planning to monitor ballot drop boxes for supposed fraud, including partnering with Steven Crowder and “working with sheriffs”
- True the Vote claims to be planning to monitor ballot drop boxes in Michigan and Wisconsin with “24/7 streaming video” that will be “available for anyone.” On War Room, founder Catherine Engelbrecht declared, “This cycle, we do intend to have eyes on those drop boxes with surveillance footage.” Media Matters, [9/5/24]
- True the Vote also claims it “is reaching out to sheriffs across the country” to monitor ballot drop boxes.In different media interviews, Engelbrecht claimed to be working with “three very influential sheriffs” in Wisconsin and said the organization is offering local sheriffs “camera equipment” to monitor drop boxes and, in exchange, the public can livestream the footage to “see for themselves what’s happening.” Media Matters, [8/6/24]
- YouTuber Steven Crowder is apparently “partnering” with True the Vote for “the scoop” from the group’s drop box monitoring.True the Vote claims it has been “setting up teams and schedules for drop boxes” to monitor “with a little handheld camera” in multiple states and says Crowder is “opening up” the organization’s efforts “to a whole new crowd.” Media Matters, [10/19/24]
- ## Right-wing groups have launched apps, hotlines, and websites for people to report supposed voter fraud and issues at the polls on Election Day
- True the Vote launched a new app for users “to quickly report problems at the polls” and “document and report instances of suspected election fraud” to funnel to local law enforcement.True the Vote claims to be “working with sheriffs” in Wisconsin and plans to funnel reports of supposed “problems at the polls” from users of its new app. Media Matters, [9/12/24, 9/20/24, 8/6/24]
- Election denial group The America Project launched an app “for people to hop on and report different things that they see that they know are illegal,” as described by the group’s Director of Rights & Freedoms, Amanda Freytes.The America Project was founded by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who following the 2020 election, became one of the country’s biggest election denial funders. Twitter/X, [10/5/24; Media Matters, 1/26/23]
- Right-wing group United Sovereign Americans launched a new “election complaint” webpage, where people can submit supposed voter fraud to authorities.Founder Marly Hornik has promoted the webpage on War Room. CNN, [10/23/24; Democracy Docket, 5/29/24]
- Judicial Watch announced it “will run an Internet hotline for voters in all states to report suspicions of election and voter fraud.”The hotline’s poster asks people to send Judicial Watch a detailed email “if you witness any suspicious activity at your polling place, have issues with your voting machine, or witness voter fraud or intimidation.” Judicial Watch, accessed [10/23/24, 10/23/24]
* YouTuber Steven Crowder touted a plan to have “boots on the ground” on Election Day because “this already is election theft,” saying there will be a “live electoral integrity map” where his audience can “see any shenanigans going on” in real time.Crowder claimed there will be “investigative journalism units and team leaders, managers in every major swing city.” Crowder also said that he would be “partnering” with True the Vote for “Election Night,” and claimed that they “will have tens of thousands of volunteers” combined “watching hundreds of key polling locations and ballot drop boxes around the country.” Media Matters, [9/23/24; Truth Social, 10/28/24]
- ## Right-wing figures are also encouraging people to monitor for noncitizens voting, or registering to vote
- During a so-called election integrity call, election denier Cleta Mitchell called on MAGA activists to watch their local Department of Motor Vehicles for noncitizen voter registration and distribute her group’s materials on the ground.Mitchell said: “There are things you can do in your local communities. Watching at your DMVs, watching - going to your election board, asking your local election officials what are you doing to ensure that noncitizen are not getting registered to vote and getting — we've got sample resolutions. We've got signs, you can download and leaflets you could hand out.” Media Matters, [10/8/24]
- On a Rumble live stream, Election Integrity Network leader Kerry Toloczko said that “we don't want noncitizen voting,” and she offered materials for right-wing activists who are planning to monitor for noncitizen voting at the local level.Toloczko, who has also appeared on Newsmax to push baseless claims of noncitizen voting, said that their activists are “everywhere” trying to “suppress the people who are trying to vote unlawfully,” asserting, “We have activists, grassroots activists, so we're handing these [signs] out in churches, in parking lots, in voting centers.” Media Matters, [10/17/24, 10/18/24]
- Wisconsin-based talk radio host Vicki McKenna urged her listeners to go to polling locations and “stand with very large signs that say in Spanish, ‘Noncitizens are not permitted to vote in the state of Wisconsin.’” McKenna warned of noncitizens voting and complained that “they don’t want you in the field. They don’t want you participating. They don’t want you observing elections.” 1310 WIBA,*The Vicki McKenna Show*, [10/18/24]
https://documented.net/investigations/exclusive-documented-obtains-recording-of-3-hour-long-voter-suppression-strategy-session-hosted-by-alec
https://slate.com/news-and-politics**/2019/10/**alec-meeting-gerrymandering-audio-recording.html
slate no lnx audio
luxury cabanas atop Austin’s JW Marriott kept state legislators cool poolside as August-in-Texas temperatures soared above 103 degrees during each day of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2019 annual meeting. The gathered Republican officials could enjoy a $14 rooftop Peppered Paloma cocktail with Patrón silver, housemade grapefruit poblano soda, and Chilean salt, all while gazing over Lady Bird Lake and the nearby state Capitol, or catching a ballgame on the cabana’s 55-inch private TV.
Downstairs, meanwhile, five of the GOP’s most seasoned redistricting minds and über-lawyers would teach them the finer points of tilting maps and drawing districts that would allow them to retain such spoils for another decade.
Slate has obtained an exclusive audio recording of the closed-door panel called “How to Survive Redistricting,” moderated by influential Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell. The panel’s four experts—Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, North Carolina election lawyer Thomas Farr, former Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, and Texas state Rep. Phil King—are among the architects and defenders of some of the most notorious gerrymanders and voter suppression plans of this decade.
During the session, the legislators were advised to treat redistricting as “political adult blood sport,” trash potential evidence before it can be discovered through litigation, avoid the word gerrymander, and make deals with black and Latino legislators that guarantee them easy reelections by packing as many minority voters as possible into their districts, thereby making the rest of the map whiter and more conservative.
“You are going to be sued. Let’s start with that.” — Cleta Mitchell
Panelists offered complicated technical advice, such as adding a legal provision that would allow a legislature to defend its maps in court even if the state attorney general refuses. And then there was less-technical advice, like being sure to put “sharp” legislators on redistricting committees because they’ll spend a lot of time explaining the maps in court.
“You are going to be sued. Let’s start with that,” Mitchell told a packed room at the ALEC gathering, attended by more than 1,400 people, including Trump administration officials and top conservative lawmakers, thinkers, donors, and activists.Mitchell made light of ALEC’s reputation as a conveyor belt for cookie-cutter conservative legislation enacted by state after state. “Mindless state legislators, we’re just pouring in information and we’re indoctrinating you, pouring into your empty skulls!” she said, sarcastically. “We’re going to teach you how to gerrymander.”:{
}::{:{
And then she did.}: “Let us begin with the fact that, probably, your notes from this conference, and this workshop, will probably be part of a discovery demand,” Mitchell said on the recording, dropping the sarcasm. “My advice to you is: If you don’t want it turned over in discovery, you probably ought to get rid of it before you go home.”}:
View Transcript
Farr, the veteran North Carolina election lawyer whose nomination to the federal bench in North Carolina ended amid persistent allegations that he had defended efforts to suppress the black vote, compared lawsuits against GOP redistricting plans to a cancer diagnosis. “You better get some chemotherapy,” he said, “because if you don’t, things aren’t going to turn out real well for you.” He also told legislators that they needed to think about any trial as a play that he would direct as the counsel, and to be sure that they created a script that an attorney could work with before a judge.
Westmoreland, the former Georgia congressman who co-chaired a Republican 2010 redistricting initiative called REDMAP, told a story about giving black Democrats in his state mapmaking software and encouraging them to draw their “perfect district,” knowing that districts filled with minority voters would make surrounding districts whiter and more Republican.
:{“We ended up being very successful with it,” Westmoreland said.
Westmoreland recalled inviting the members of the “black caucus” to his office, “off campus,” to create their “perfect map.” One incumbent, he said, “finally fell into the trap and came over there and drew his perfect district.” To show the redistricting plan benefited black Democrats too, he “immediately got the local paper down there” to run an article on that lawmaker’s perfect district. Westmoreland then included a district as close as possible to that overwhelmingly black and Democratic one in the state’s official map. The legislator, he said, voted against the map and soon lost his seat.}:
“I promise you it’ll be beneficial to you,” he told the ALEC attendees. “They still want to be reelected. They still want to have the best district they can have.”
View Transcript
The speakers repeatedly insisted that there is no such thing as a nonpartisan redistricting process. Farr argued that maps can never be neutral. “Every time you draw a districting line, it benefits one party and hurts the other party,” he said.
:{
The idea that Republicans are simply fighting similarly skewed Democratic gerrymanders has been debunked}:. According to a University of Southern California study, 59 million Americans live in states where at least one chamber of the state legislature is controlled by the party that won fewer votes in 2018. In every case, Republicans drew the lines, and hold minority control. That the process is inherently political has been disproved as well: Several states, including California, Iowa, and New Jersey, use independent commissions or various neutral or bipartisan processes that have successfully created fairer and more competitive maps. Three-quarters of the seats that flipped during the 2018 U.S. House elections were drawn by commissions or courts. Studies show that maps become more representative and equitable when more parties have a seat at the table.
:{
Nevertheless, Farr urged these lawmakers to make their processes appear as open as possible, even though they are driven by partisanship behind closed doors.
The legislative record, he told them, must appear to be business as usual, following every statute, with every transcript and debate filed for the record.
Given that every map could end up in court, Farr advised extraordinary caution. “You never know what you might say, even if it’s unjust, that the left can take out of context and try to use to make the Republicans look like they’re evil.”
Then, in court, Farr could take it from there.}:
“It’s like I’m a director of a play,” he explained to the room. “I know what I want the play to look like for the judges when we actually have to go and defend what we’ve done in court, and so this is why you want to make it look like—I know most of you know this already—you’re very cordial, cooperative with the minority party or the opposing party. … The more you take the high road in the legislative process, the better it’s going to look in court when you have to defend what you’ve done.”
View Transcript
Republicans, Farr suggested, are outgunned by the litigation power and the expert witnesses on the side of fair maps. He complained that Republicans have only five or six expert witnesses, while Democrats have between 18 and 20 “really outstanding and smart people” able to explain “newfangled theories” about identifying gerrymanders.
Many of those expert witnesses create tens of thousands of neutral maps using nonpartisan, legal redistricting criteria. Courts in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio were all persuaded to overturn maps as partisan gerrymanders by relying, in part, on simulated maps that demonstrate that the ones drawn by legislators are wild partisan outliers. This technological advancement offers the potential of using the same technology that partisans use to rig maps to strip their intent bare. For Farr, this is a great threat. He warned the legislators that computer-assisted maps would be the tactic deployed against their maps as partisan gerrymandering moves to state courts during the upcoming 2020 redistricting cycle—and that he would help them defeat those maps.
“Garbage in and garbage out,” he said. “You can read these things to get the results that you want.” Farr said that the professors working on these simulated maps were “very smart” and that the work is “very complex.” “You’ve got to get the right experts to look at their algorithm and all the backup that they have. But there’s a definite way to defeat the concept of computer-simulated maps.”
View Transcript
As Farr and Westmoreland taught lawmakers to conceal the true intent of their maps and appear to play by the rules, Von Spakovsky envisioned a longer game to change the rules of redistricting entirely.
Von Spakovsky, a member of the Trump-Kobach “election fraud” commission,urged GOP lawmakers to use citizenship data to redistrict state legislatures rather than count the total populations of districts, the latter being the constitutional standard for U.S. House districts and the longtime norm for states, as well. Most state legislatures, however, could redistrict state legislative lines based on citizen population, in most cases simply by passing a statute. (Recent revelations from the files of late GOP redistricting mastermind Thomas Hofeller demonstrated that Republicans attempted to place a citizenship question on the 2020 census to gather citizenship data for this purpose.)
“All of you need to seriously consider switching to using citizen population to do redistricting,” he said, asserting that the concept of “one person, one vote” was just something that liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court “created … out of whole cloth.”
Von Spakovsky also told lawmakers that census data is important for two reasons: the apportionment of U.S. House seats, and state and federal redistricting. Congressional apportionment based on total population, as the Constitution mandates, is “fundamentally unfair,” he said, because “states with large numbers of aliens, particularly illegal aliens, are getting more political power.”
“Liberals do not want you doing this,” he said, because “the higher the number of noncitizens in a district, the greater the chances they’re going to vote for a liberal.”
View Transcript
Von Spakovsky also praised Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority, 5–4 opinion earlier this year in Rucho v. Common Cause,which essentially closed the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims. But he warned that other legal avenues are still open to proponents of fair maps. “What you have to understand is this is not the end of this,” he said.
Gerrymandered maps could get challenged under state constitutions as a political question, he said, or in federal courts for unconstitutional use of race data and for diluting the votes of minorities contrary to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He called this “the Goldilocks principle of redistricting,” noting that “you can’t use too much race,” but if you don’t use race at all, “Hispanics, African Americans are going to claim you didn’t create a district in which they can elect a candidate of their choice.”
To withstand these inevitable legal challenges, the panelists said, it is important to control not only legislative majorities but also the judges approving or rejecting redistricting plans.
“Always know who’s going to end up ruling on your maps,” Westmoreland, the Georgia lawmaker, advised. “It’s important to work with the judges, the judicial system. You need to work for your attorney generals. … You need to work with as many organizations that you can to make sure that not only you win the majority, but that you elect people that are going to be able to supervise what these maps, or what you, come up with.”
Enticing more “dance partners” from minority groups to protect their own seats is another key part of that plan.
“It’s not rocket science,” Westmoreland said. “It’s politics.”
Read the full transcript of the ALEC meeting here.
This story is part of Slate’s Who Counts? project, which investigates who has decision-making power in America and what happens to those who don’t. Read more from Dahlia
==
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…”
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9/17
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/kris-kobachs-breathtakingly-dishonest-claim-about-voter-fraud-in-new-hampshire/
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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.
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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 studentswho 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 offelon 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
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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
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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
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.
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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 justification 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 theBrennan 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 that theJustice 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
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/04/donald-trumps-widespread-voter-fraud-claim-untrue-election-official/905262002/
wASHINGTON – There's no proof to support President Donald Trump's repeated claims of widespread voter fraud during the 2016 election, according to a member of the disbanded commission set up to examine abuse at the ballot box.
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Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, who sat on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, wrote Friday that a review of documents shows the panel's evidence of voter fraud is "glaringly empty."
Dunlap said the documents confirmed the commission's "troubling bias" that assumed widespread fraud going into the review before any data had been collected.
The letter was addressed to Vice President Mike Pence, who chaired the commission, and vice-chair Kris Kobach, secretary of state for Kansas. Kobach, who is running for governor, has often aired the president's unproved claims of massive voter fraud.
Since the disputed 2000 election, numerous government and private investigations and reports have found no substantial amount of voter fraud. Trump said 3 million to 5 million illegal votes took place. "As Secretary of State, I am deeply involved in election integrity issues," Dunlap wrote. "Yet neither through my work, nor my time on the Commission, have I ever seen 'substantial evidence of widespread voter fraud.' Rather, these assertions appeared aimed at that pre-ordained objective: ratifying the President's statements that millions of illegal votes were cast during the 2016 elections." >posted the documents on his office's website. He obtained them through a court order after he sued the commission for records and testimony it gathered during the six months it operated.
The panel, which Trump established by executive order last year, faced headwinds from the start.
Civil rights groups decried it as a sham designed to legitimize the president's narrative that he really won the popular vote and encourage states to make voting hard, especially for African-Americans, Hispanics and poor people.
Many state and local elections officials, including some Republicans, refused to hand over records, citing privacy concerns and a lack of voting abuses.
The commission suffered from infighting as some members, including Dunlap, said they were being shut out of certain deliberations because of their skepticism.
In January, Trump signed an executive order disbanding the election integrity commission, saying he didn't want to waste taxpayer money fighting with state governments over their voter data.
Trump said the commission's work will go to the Department of Homeland Security.
https://www.propublica.org/article/election-commission-documents-cast-doubt-on-trumps-claims-of-voter-fraud
https://www.propublica.org/article/election-commission-documents-cast-doubt-on-trumps-claims-of-voter-fraud
Election Commission Documents Cast Doubt on Trump’s Claims of Voter Fraud
Thousands of pages of internal records are likely to bolster critics of the short-lived Trump administration commission.
Aug. 3, 2018, 6:23 p.m. EDT
In May of 2017, President Donald Trump established a presidential commission to explore the threat of voter fraud — staffing it with multiple Republicans who had theorized that fraud was a substantial problem in American democracy. The commission, widely called the voter fraud commission, was immediately criticized as a political creation aimed at a phony problem.
In January, Trump disbanded the commission, which by then had produced little if any evidence that voter fraud was a significant menace.
Today, thousands of commission documents were released that show aspects of the body’s inner workings. As critics have suggested, the records — a mix of memos, internal emails and reports — make clear the commission’s work was driven by a small number of members who were convinced voter fraud was widespread, and that other members were often excluded from critical decisions about the commission’s aims and tactics.
The documents were provided to ProPublica by American Oversight — a group that provided legal representation to Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, who had been a Democratic member of the commission. Dunlap has contended that the commission’s leaders left him out of key deliberations, which he was entitled to participate in by law.
The judge ruled that the commission must disclose documentation related to internal deliberations, and the commission did so on July 18. Below is a sampling of some of the noteworthy material in them:
In January, when Trump abruptly dissolved the commission, he claimed that it had “substantial evidence of voter fraud” and that the commission’s “initial findings” would be turned over to the Department of Homeland Security. But the documents released today show there was nothing to support these claims.
On Nov. 18, 2017, Andrew Kossack — the executive director of the commission — circulated a draft “Staff Report” on the commission’s work. The report is a summary of the commission’s efforts, which Kossack appears to have been compiling beginning in August. The draft report included a prewritten section called “Evidence of Election Integrity and Voter Fraud Issues.” The section, with few exceptions, wound up almost entirely blank.
Austin Evers, the executive director of American Oversight, said the lack of material in the section set aside for evidence of fraud or other voting problems “shows that the White House knew, or at least should have known, that it was blatantly lying when they made those claims in January.”
Requests for comment sent to both the White House and Kris Kobach, the former vice-chair of the commission, have not yet been returned.
The only known action taken by the commission during its short life was a letter it sent to all 50 states in late June 2017 requesting copies of publicly available voter rolls, which list registered voters in each state. The letter did not include any details about how the records would be used, and many state officials denied the request.
Today’s documents show the commission worked behind the scenes with Republican Party officials in at least one state to circumvent the decisions of state officials.
John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state for Alabama, had denied the commission access to the state’s voter rolls, saying it violated Alabama law to distribute the data to such an entity.
However, in an email exchange with Kobach, Terry Lathan, the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, said, “The ALGOP will honor your request and have a full state voter pull for the commission you chair.” Lathan added that the party’s political director would “initiate this process immediately.”
Read More
How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed
From a new Supreme Court ruling to a census question about citizenship, the campaign against illegal registration is thriving. But when the top proponent was challenged in a Kansas courtroom to prove that such fraud is rampant, the claims went up in smoke.
Merrill told ProPublica he was unaware that the state Republican Party had sent the list to the commission. Moreover, he said, the list would have been out of date — perhaps by several months.
After Colorado agreed to send information to the commission, voters there began canceling their voter registrations so that the Trump administration would not have access to their data. At the time, Colorado officials told ProPublica they were not worried — Colorado is a same-day-registration state, so voters could re-register even on the day of the next election in which they wanted to cast a ballot.
But Dick Lamm, a former governor of Colorado, and Roy Beck, the president of NumbersUSA, an organization that advocates for stricter limits on immigration, exchanged emails about the de-registration in the state.
In them, Lamm tells Beck he thinks those who deregistered should be investigated. “I suspect many/most of these were illegals now scared of Trump’s new policies,” he wrote.
Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations for NumbersUSA, forwarded the exchange to Kobach saying, “Definitely interesting stuff for the Commission to check into, especially since Colorado is cooperating!” The documents do not make clear if such an inquiry was ever begun.
Several secretaries of state — including Merrill — expressed frustration with the commission after receiving the letters requesting voter rolls, responding to the commission with questions about how the data would be used.
The documents show that Kobach initially wanted to tell the states some of what the data might be used for. He wanted to “compare voter rolls to federal databases of known noncitizens residing in the United States to identify ineligible noncitizens who have become registered.”
It was an odd aim, for Kobach, the secretary of state in Kansas, had admitted during litigation in Kansas that such comparisons were not productive or reliable.
The commission ultimately never told the secretaries of state that the data might be used in this way, and took this out of communications to the states at the behest of Vice President Mike Pence’s office.
The vice president’s office did not respond to a request for comment on this matter.
The documents released today also suggest that the commission had intended to ask states for far more information than has been publicly reported.
ProPublica first reported last October that Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams— two individuals who are closely associated with advocacy for strict laws to prevent voter fraud — provided feedback on the request for state voter rolls behind the scenes before their formal appointment to the commission. The documents now show their specific suggestions.
In addition to the voter roll data, von Spakovsky and Adams jointly recommended the commission ask for a long list of other data from states. Those on the email chain jointly agreed that the first request should be simple, and that additional data could be requested later.
It appears the commission quickly made plans to request some of the additional data the pair had requested, namely jury questionnaires. The documents show that in late June, at the same time the original letter was sent, Kobach and members of the Office of the Vice President had drafted and finalized a letter to send to federal clerks’ offices requesting information on “all individuals determined to be ineligible or who were otherwise excused from federal jury duty” because they had died, moved out of the jurisdiction, had a felony conviction, or were not U.S. citizens. They specifically requested the names of the individuals and their addresses, and the reason they were excused from jury duty, and “other identifying information associated with each individual.”
It is not immediately clear if this letter was sent. The data could have been used to compare against the voter rolls the commission was collecting in an attempt to suss out individuals that remained on the voter rolls after their deaths or a move, or non-citizens who were registered to vote.
In a letter addressed to Pence and Kobach sent today, Dunlap confirmed he had no knowledge of the plan to request this information despite his role as a commissioner. “I have no way of knowing whether these requests were issued or, if not, why not, but Vice Chair Kobach’s and certain commissioners’ cavalier attitude towards vacuuming data is troubling,” he wrote.
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