Trumps Voter Fraud Endgame

[babylonsister]

Trump’s Voter Fraud Endgame
His “election integrity” investigation is a pretext to repeal the National Voter Registration Act. It won’t work.
By Richard L. Hasen


Donald Trump’s attempt at voter suppression through his “election integrity” commission is a voting rights nightmare that is being enacted so clumsily it just might backfire.

Both before and after the election, Trump made wild and unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and the system being “rigged.” Before the election, many of the claims were about voters voting five, 10, or 15 times by impersonating other voters. The ridiculous and unproven charges of voter fraud had a racial tinge, with suggestions the fraud would happen in majority minority communities.* According to the New York Times, he told an audience in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a few weeks before Election Day: “I just hear such reports about Philadelphia. … I hear these horror shows, and we have to make sure that this election is not stolen from us and is not taken away from us.” He added for emphasis: “Everybody knows what I’m talking about.”

After the election, he shifted his unsubstantiated fraud talk from rumormongering about voter impersonation to claims of massive noncitizen voting. Trump said repeatedly that 3 to 5 million illegal voters had cast ballots, a claim so outlandish it is hard to know where to start to refute it. (We could start with a Brennan Center report which, so far, has found a total of 30 cases nationwide of possible noncitizen voting. That’s 30, not 300, 3,000, 30,000, 300,000, or 3 million.) He claimed that “none” of the supposed fraudulent votes went to him.

In hindsight, the focus on noncitizen voting makes sense, and the endgame is about passing federal legislation to make it harder for people to register and vote. The noncitizen focus fits in with Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric as well as the rhetoric of Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has been advising Trump on voter fraud issues. Kobach has repeatedly lost in lawsuits against the American Civil Liberties Union on account of his actions to make it harder for people to register and vote. Just last week, a federal magistrate judge fined him $1,000 for misleading the court by attempting to shield a document regarding his advice to Trump on how to make voter registration harder.

more...

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/06/donald_trump_s_voter_fraud_commission_is_itself_an_enormous_fraud.html

[secondwind]

1. K&R

[Dustlawyer]

2. We are watching you now Kris, it won't work!

The Republicans are reduced to cheating to hold on to power. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, propaganda, Russia and big whopping campaign lies.

Even though Trump, McConnell, and Ryan are terrible for our country and our Democracy, they have helped in one respect. They have motivated the left to get out and be active. That is the silver lining. TPTB have been gaining money and power incrementally for the last 40 years. Under Trump they have decided to go for it all at once, ripping the curtain back, taking the props away showing the brick wall behind (paraphrasing Frank Zappa). The greed of the plutocrats and corporations knows no bounds. They always go too far.

Now regular Americans are waking up. They are seeing this as having a terrible effect on THEIR lives whereas before they barely noticed. The RW through their propaganda has been able to keep their base angry, afraid and thus unwilling to consider facts that do not fit with their indoctrination. This has allowed the Right to win the mid-terms consistently because they are always as mad as we are now.

Now is the time to make our presence felt and I hope we do not squander it by electing those who do not wish to make the changes we need to fi our broken political system. We must take the money out of our elections to neuter the Donor class and stop them from buying OUR REPRESENTATIVES!!! We must bust up the media oligarchies and require truth in our news. No more can they legally lie to us and get away with it by calling it "entertainment" as they did in a Florida Court of Appeals case. We also need to beef up our regulatory agencies and make it so that they are not an extension of the industries that they regulate.

Wake up, get active, and don't let assholes like Kris Kobach and Trump rig our elections!

[gademocrat7]

3. K&R

[Stellar]

4. Voter Fraud? When Trump can't even agree with the number of people...

at his inauguration through pictures.

Why doesn't he first show proof of that 'so-called' 3 million people he claimed fraudulently voted, instead of the states giving up all of our most personal information?

And BTW: show us your damned tax return because the majority of people in this country need to see if/ how you are selling this country out.

[dchill]

5. "BTW: show us your damned tax return..."

Uh huh. That'd be great.

[Squinch]

6. This line is astonishing, but it got lost in all the other unbelievable things he's doing:

"Just last week, a federal magistrate judge fined him $1,000 for misleading the court by attempting to shield a document regarding his advice to Trump on how to make voter registration harder."

Which means that Trump(R) is soliciting advice on how to make voter registration harder.

This should be a headline on the front page of the major papers, but there are too many other headlines for this to get through.

His tactics are working. As Rachel says, we have to stop playing his requests. We have to have small spaces dedicated to his tweets and big spaces dedicated to his attempts to dismantle our Democracy.