Forty-four states are refusing a federal commission’s request to turn over personal information for a cross-check data system to fight voter fraud.
The request is larded with laughable ironies, but they’re not funny at all when one considers the implications of this data-gathering attempt. The following are some of the ironies that show how this commission is as bogus as the Senate health-care proposal:
Irony Number 1: The Bipartisan Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was initiated May 11 via executive order by President Donald Trump. Remember, he’s the one who insisted, with not a scintilla of evidence, that anywhere from 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in the last election. Those voters, he expects us to believe, “stole” the popular vote from him.
Irony Number 2: Vice President Mike Pence is the titular head of the commission. Its real mover-and-shaker is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, known for his aggressive support for voter suppression in the guise of “election integrity.” Kobach is the one who requested states to turn over personal information that includes all names, addresses, birth dates, military status, political affiliations, voting histories and last four digits of Social Security numbers. He might as well have added, for good measure, color of underwear.
Irony Number 3: Oops! What’s good for the goose is not always good for the gander. Kobach said he cannot comply with his own request to turn over Kansas’s resident’s Social Security numbers because they are not publicly available under Kansas law. Tsk, tsk.
Irony Number 4: There is no widespread voter fraud – thus no rationale for this commission or its requests. And how’s this for an irony wrapped in an irony? In Kansas, Kobach scored only nine voting-fraud convictions since 2014.
Irony Number 5: The data requested by Kobach will be stored in a data bank in – of all places – the White House. There, in-house workers (foxes in a chicken coop) will sift through it, seeking rampant fraud, looking for dead people, ordering the purging of names from voting rolls.
Irony Number 6: While the commission is in hot pursuit of Phantom Fraud, Trump and others will be busily denying or underplaying Russia’s interference in the last election. Foreign cyber-meddling is an infinitely more dangerous threat to free-and-fair elections – the very foundation of our democracy – than is alleged voter fraud.
The cross-checking of names in a massive voting data base is wildly unreliable, causing the names of hundreds of thousands of prospective voters to be purged from the rolls. That means eligible voters will be denied the right to vote, and that’s already happened – is happening. North Carolina and Wisconsin – to name two of the worst – are notorious for voting-suppression efforts of every sort.
Kobach, to support his claim of thousands of dead people voting, used the name of one dead Kansas man he said voted. A reporter later found that man in his yard, mowing his lawn. The man cracked a joke about how if he’s dead and in heaven, how come he’s having to do yardwork? Turns out, the lawn-mowing man, very much alive, did indeed vote. His deceased father, with the same name, didn’t.
A Brennan Center For Justice report found 31 cases of non-citizen voters nationwide in the last election. It’s good that voting integrity is a priority. What’s not good are commissions like this, created for a non-problem and stacked with voter-suppression activists. Unless suppression laws and blatantly skewed gerrymandering schemes are overturned by courts (many have been stricken, thank goodness), the next election will be riddled with distrust and, once again, Americans’ faith in our electoral process will have been damaged, just as the Russian meddlers had hoped – are hoping.
Another irony: A U.S. House committee recently voted to defund the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an already underfunded, understaffed agency charged with certifying the security of voting machines – an ongoing task that is absolutely crucial to the integrity of the voting process.
And here is the final irony: What should have been created via a Trump executive order is a Bipartisan Commission to Insure Election Integrity Against Attacks Foreign and Domestic (and the latter could include the voting-suppressors on this so-called Integrity Commission).
