While everyone was obsessing over the latest Trump Twitter outrage, his administration was moving forward with the latest assault on democracy and American rights.
His Orwellian-named “Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity“ (which is anything but), otherwise known as the voter fraud commission, sent out a letter signed by Kris Kobach to every state’s election official “requesting” (since the commission has no real authority or power) their entire voter database, including party registration, a decade’s worth of voter history, address, partial social security number, birthdate, military service and felony convictions, and whether the voter is registered in more than one state.
But Kobach’s “request” sounds less like an effort to find out whether our elections are honest and fair, versus a data mining operation for Trump and the Republicans so that they can expand upon their tactics of the 2016 campaign — focusing on fake news, social media trolling in pinpointed districts where just a small nudge could tilt the balance in their favor — which is why a mere 70,000 votes across three states trumped a loss of 3 million popular votes for Hillary Clinton nationally.
That is what is at the heart of the Russia collusion investigation — and what Kobach and his commission, if he is really interested in “election integrity” should be examining, but clearly they are not, because Trump was the beneficiary and because it contradicts Trump’s claim of a “mandate”.
And what if they find that there are 5 million or even 10 million people who have registered in more than one place — like Ivanka Trump and Steve Bannon — or that there are 1 million “dead people” still on the rolls?
Unless they voted twice or if a dead person sent in an absentee ballot, these votes did not impact the “integrity” of the election.
What is more, Kobach is demanding this data be sent over unsecured email servers, an engraved invitation from this inept administration for malevolence, when even government agencies as secure and cyber-sophisticated as the NSA, Pentagon, Office of Personnel Management, the Secretary of State’s office, indeed the election rolls of 39 states, have been hacked by Russia.
The states’ election machinery — made worse after the “Help America Vote Act” that followed the 2000 pregnant chads controversy — is woefully inadequate, a fact demonstrated in 2004 when Walden “Wally” O’Dell, CEO of Diebold, the black box manufacturer, promised to deliver Ohio to George W. Bush, and he did — and if the NSA, Pentagon, banks, utilities could all be hacked, why would elections not be?
The argument here is that elections are so decentralized, the results could not be altered sufficiently. In the first place the weak link is where the various election districts electronically send their results to a single center for tabulation.
But the 70,000 versus 3 million vote tally which gave Trump the White House is proof enough that the argument that decentralization is what protects the sanctity of the democratic process is specious.
Kobach’s “election integrity” commission is about voter intimidation on top of the voter suppression tactics that Republicans have put through in the states they control, because Republicans realized long ago that low turnout favors their candidates.
The problem isn’t over voting, it is under-voting — a 60 percent turnout in an election as controversial and consequential as 2016 — and this is exactly how the data that Kobach is mining could be weaponized.
There are already enumerable examples of Republicans committing election fraud.
Instead of the non-existent voter fraud issue — 44 instances out of more than 1 billion votes cast between 2000-2012, a rate of 0.0000044 percent — there needs to be reforms made to voting, which though a function the Constitution leaves to the states, should still include federal minimal standards for access to voter registration and polling places (to satisfy the 14th Amendment providing for Equal Protection as well as the 15th Amendment, the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged) — where located, people served, hours of opening, minimal number of voting machines per voters, provisions for early voting and absentee voting; requirements for security for electronic, black-box voting devices, back-up paper ballots and auditing after each election, as well as requirements for mandatory hand recounts if the margin is 1 percent or less; a requirement that when a person is “purged” from voting rolls, a letter be sent informing them, with a remedy for correcting the record; making tampering with voter registration, rolls or elections, including giving fraudulent information about voting places, hours, accessibility a felony crime; and yes, a provision for nullifying an election which has been demonstrated to have been substantively tampered with.
We have said for a long time, that this is a reason why young people do not vote in the numbers they should: they are too fearful of breaking a law if they vote absentee in their home districts after having moved to a new place for a job. And moved. And moved again. There needs to be clarification of rules allowing people to vote where they were last registered, or regularly vote, and provisions that require people who have not voted in a district for, say, 10 consecutive years, to reregister or be removed.
On this July 4th, even Trump supporters should be standing up for the basic principle of a government established for and by its people. Which means promoting voting, not suppressing it.
