Blows the GOP's Cover on Voter Suppression Efforts

[struggle4progress]

By Bridgette Dunlap
51 minutes ago

Almost no one in the United States commits voter fraud ... Defrauding the voting system entails a lot of risk and no reward, so there's little incentive to risk a felony conviction to cast an extra vote that is virtually certain not to change the outcome of an election. This is especially true for undocumented immigrants who would risk deportation to vote. And, in general, Americans are hardly so committed to voting that they're breaking the law to cast extra ballots ...

Kobach's request is legally problematic in many ways. It likely violates the Privacy Act, which limits the kinds of data the government can ask for and includes procedural requirements aimed at preventing data breaches and misuse. It's also a likely violation of the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires federal agencies to give notice of and seek approval for potentially burdensome information requests. Furthermore, collecting that much data in one place is a recipe for a national security disaster, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center has sued the commission alleging statutory and constitutional violations ...

Kobach should know better than anyone that voter fraud isn't a real problem, because the Kansas legislature gave him the authority – unique among secretaries of state – to prosecute the crime. Though Kobach claimed there were as many as 18,000 noncitizens registered to vote in the state, he had a tough time finding anyone to prosecute. He obtained nine convictions, mostly of confused older voters who owned property in two states and made honest mistakes ...

Trump won the Electoral College thanks to tiny margins in three states. Demographic trends are not in his favor. Having opted not to appeal to minority voters, suppressing their vote is his best hope for reelection and maintaining GOP control of Congress in the midterms. But the attempts to justify his outlandish million-illegal-votes claim may stretch the voter-fraud myth to the point of breaking ...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trump-blows-the-gops-cover-on-voter-suppression-efforts-w491330

[liberalla]

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