Why we should be very afraid of Trump's vote suppression commission
By Paul Waldman June 30 at 1:04 PM
Most presidential commissions don’t accomplish very much — they meet a few times, do some research and produce a report, which then gets filed away and few people ever read, the list of recommendations seldom acted on. But President Trump’s Presidential Commission on Election Integrity is different.
Its goal is nothing less than the supercharging of recent Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters and permanently tip the scales of elections in the GOP’s favor. Its true name should be the Commission on Vote Suppression, and it’s getting right to work.
This commission is led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is the country’s premier advocate of vote suppression (Vice President Pence is the nominal chair, but as vice chair, Kobach is obviously running things). We’ll get more into Kobach’s agenda in a moment, but first, the latest news. This week the commission sent a letter to all 50 state governments demanding that they send the commission their full voter files, including names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliation, voting history and Social Security numbers for every voter in America.
While some of that information is publicly available for a fee (parties and candidates buy it to target voters), Democratic officials in a number of states have essentially told Kobach to buzz off. The secretaries of state in Kentucky, California, and Massachusetts have refused, and the secretary of state in Connecticut said she will withhold some parts of the data, noting that Kobach “has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas.” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said, “I have no intention of honoring this request,” and other Democratic states are sure to follow.
The commission will probably end up obtaining most of the data it is after one way or another. So what are they going to do with it? It’s no secret: Under the guise of fighting “voter fraud,” they’ll use it as a tool to disenfranchise thousands, perhaps even millions of people, in order to solidify the Republican advantage in elections.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/06/30/why-we-should-be-very-afraid-of-trumps-vote-suppression-commission/?utm_term=.13f6635b57c1&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1
= new reply since forum marked as read
