Kobach begins afternoon session of voting commission by repeating his NH voter fraud lie with only "anecdotal" evidence pic.twitter.com/fPJSXbVWlm
— Kira Lerner (@kira_lerner) September 12, 2017
I keep starting long, link-heavy posts about Kobach’s hand-picked vote-suppression committee… and the evil bastids keep getting ahead of the news. Shorter: These guys are more dangerous to the American way than a coalition of acting-out white supremacists ganged up with a band of black bloc window-breakers.
… In an September 7th article for Breitbart News, Kobach claimed that 5,313 New Hampshire voters were not residents of the state. The only “evidence” he could muster, however, was that the 5,313 had registered to vote with out-of-state driver’s licenses but had not registered a car in New Hampshire. Kobach forgot—or just intentionally ignored in furtherance of his own agenda—that thousands of New Hampshire college students from other states reside and attend classes in New Hampshire districts that saw high voter turnouts in 2016.
Kobach added that New Hampshire Democrat Maggie Hassan likely only won her senate race because it was “stolen through voter fraud.” He did not even claim to have proof.
Assembled by Trump by executive order in early May, the commission was tasked with completing a report about “vulnerabilities and issues related to voter registration and voting.” Its creation followed erroneous claims repeated by the president alleging widespread voter fraud which the president has claimed cost him the popular vote. Seemingly emasculated by having obtained fewer votes nationwide than Clinton, Trump asserted weeks after his inauguration that between 3 and 5 million illegal ballots were cast for his opponent…
Kobach and Pence eventually appointed five Democrats and seven Republicans to the commission, though Democrat Luis E. Borunda, Maryland’s deputy secretary of state, has since resigned. But it remains completely under the direction of the Republicans.
“Any truly bipartisan commission on these things has to have bipartisan leadership,” Danielle Lang, an attorney for the Campaign Legal Center, told Gizmodo. “There has to be some kind of bipartisan power on the commission—or it’s just a fig leaf. If you look at all of the former commissions that this would be similar to, they all had Democrat and Republican vice chairs. Instead, in this case, you have Kris Kobach and Mike Pence. That alone truly disqualifies it from being truly bipartisan in any meaningful way.” …
And given his background, Hans von Spakovsky should be particularly ashamed of himself, if only he understood the concept of ‘shame’.
Heritage Foundation wrote to Sessions & said voter fraud commission should exclude Dems & "mainstream Republicans" https://t.co/WV6DLEpfkA pic.twitter.com/X6lbOZWyqk
— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) September 12, 2017
Update: @Heritage just confirmed Hans von Spakovsky authored the letter. He's on the election fraud panel. (DOJ had redacted his name.) pic.twitter.com/EOHMwoCk6f
— Dell Cameron (@dellcam) September 12, 2017
I asked Hans von Spakovsky point blank less than two hours ago if he authored this document, he said no. https://t.co/Gxz1ON5Pxj
— Jessica Huseman (@JessicaHuseman) September 12, 2017
Commission ended up finding Dems from GOP-run areas who wouldn't put up a fight. https://t.co/VkMP3jcZNc
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) September 12, 2017
Baud
Dems could surprise them by putting up a fight.
efgoldman
Wasn’t Kobach sanctioned by a federal judge for lying to the court or failing to produce evidence?
schrodingers_cat
Why does Kobach look so bloated? Is he a drunk too, like Bannon?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Sure, I believe you.
debbie
Has anyone witch hunted, er, investigated vote fixing in Kansas? I wouldn’t put that past this guy.
randy khan
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
They already have. The hearing in New Hampshire was a debacle for Kobach.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Somebody needs to get these creeps to cough up the proof of all this voter fraud they keep moaning about. It isn’t like anybody could commit widespread voter fraud and not leave proof all over the place. Who voted in which election is public record. The only way to realistically steal an election through voter fraud is to pay people to show up and vote in the name of dead people, and deaths are also public record. All they need to do is choose a county, any county, any state, go there and cross check the death records with the voter records. Easy as pie. They don’t need to do anything else. Why doesn’t anybody make a stink about this? Why doesn’t anybody call them on this?
James Powell
@efgoldman:
Republicans consider that a good thing because those are the same federal courts that ordered desegregation and tried to put their beloved Sheriff in jail.
Major Major Major Major
Yeahhhhh fuck these guys. God. Ugh.
Ruckus
Why do we have to look at pictures of smarmy assholes on the FP? Couldn’t those be after the fold so that my blood pressure might have a chance of not pinning the machine every time I check in at BJ? Isn’t it bad enough that we have to survive these assholes and work to throw them out, but we also have to see them? Geezee Louise.
Ruckus
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Proof? We don’t need no stinking proof? Besides if you made us prove any of this bullshit, we’d be bigger failures than you could even imagine.
/dumbshit kobach.
Or
/lying sack of shit kobach.
MomSense
I was pleased with Dunlap.
SFAW
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Typical libtard “logic.”
What about all those coloreds who somehow managed to get “registered”? It’s not as if they’re REAL Americans, with rights and stuff. And
gays being allowed to marrytheir being “registered” detracts fromhetero couples’ marriagesREAL Americans having the franchise. What’s next? Will they want to get that additional 40 percent of citizenship that they think they’re owed? Why ain’t they happy with the 60 they got? More welfare, I tells ya.Anne Laurie
@Ruckus: Took out the photo, just for you, sir!
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: There is a professor whose research focuses on the intersection of technology and elections who is in a prolonged legal fight to get all the data from the state of Kansas in order to do a full and proper analysis. What she’s done so far, based on publicly available data, is quite damning.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@SFAW: I know that that’s kind of the implication, but we need to get these clowns to own up to that or come up with some proof. People don’t hit these guys hard enough on this point. The proof, if any of this is happening (and I know it isn’t, but I’m saying “if” for the sake of argument) there will be proof out the ass in any county courthouse where it’s going on, just sitting there, waiting for some fearless crusader to come and blow the lid off the biggest story since the Russians elected an American president. They need to either own up to their real motives here or be shamed into admitting this isn’t happening.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
The MSM, were they not a bunch of stenos, should bring this up every f-ing time Kobach appears behind a microphone.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
And to be clear, I know that Kobach and von Spakovsky are never going to own up to what they’re really doing or why, but by cornering them, bearing down on them again and again with these same questions, it would become obvious to onlookers what’s really going on here.
efgoldman
@SFAW:
I have a feeling he will eventually join the orange jumpsuit brigade.
SFAW
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
As I said to Adam, @ 17, about a slightly different aspect, “The MSM, were they not a bunch of stenos, should bring this up every f-ing time Kobach appears behind a microphone”
Kobach and von Spakovsky are out-and-out racists, but until Zombie Kay Graham or Zombie Punch Sulzberger takes over her/his former paper, it probably will not happen.
SFAW
@efgoldman:
Oh, please, let it be so.
Ruckus
@Anne Laurie:
Grazie
Frankensteinbeck
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
People make a stink and call them on it all the time. Those people are Democrats, so you don’t hear about it. See @randy khan above. What you’re ultimately asking is why doesn’t anybody you see make a stink about it, and that’s because the people who decide what you see are the press. The national press are shitty at convincing, but great at controlling what is and is not available for discussion.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@Frankensteinbeck:
Well, yeah, that’s what I mean, people in the press. I know about these guys and what they’re doing, and everybody who reads this blog and others like it know, but we need people in the press to begin saying this. Most people don’t know what these guys are really doing because they don’t follow this the way we do. That’s the press’s job, to point things like this out.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
What power does this commission have anyway? Presidential commissions are just advisory commissions that don’t have the force of law behind them right? Who’s going to take this shit seriously when they produce their little report. It will likely be ripped apart by experts if it’s such a blatant call for voter suppression. Right?
Major Major Major Major
@Frankensteinbeck: that reminds me of the whole “well Hillary never said x during the campaign” thing. She did! It just wasn’t reported because they were too busy covering Trump’s empty podium.
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
I am against the death penalty on moral grounds but I am willing to be persuaded that there are instances that might warrant it.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Work the refs. Work low information voters. Both of which provide top cover for GOP state legislators and GOP governors to pass and sign restrictions on voting to counteract fraud that doesn’t actually exist in order to depress turnout among people of color, students, young adults, etc.
Frankensteinbeck
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
It should be. One of the great frustrations of our situation is that in practice it isn’t. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Thankfully, they have jack shit power, and the people who they might give excuses to commit voter suppression didn’t need excuses. Honestly, I think the commission has no point but to salve Trump’s ego by helping him pretend he didn’t lose the popular vote – badly, ‘2.8 million people’ lose it.
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: its recommendations will be implemented at the state level in red states a la ALEC. But no, it has no de jure power.
Ruckus
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Once upon a time there might have been a glimmer of truth to that. A one watt bulb on the surface of the sun glimmer but yes there might have been one.
Today? No, the job of the MSM is to sell the news that the paper’s owner wants to read. IOW truth be damned, make fucking money. Full Stop. Anything else is likely to get them fired.
Frankensteinbeck
@Adam L Silverman:
I don’t think that really has any weight in practice. The people it would give cover to already have lots of conspiracy theories to turn to. If Kobach even comes up with anything, it will just be added to the already towering pile of fake claims.
@Major Major Major Major:
Similarly, they already have those recommendations. It’s not like Kobach is going to be able to make that any worse than it is.
Adam L Silverman
@Frankensteinbeck: Always be selling…
Major Major Major Major
@Frankensteinbeck: it’ll have the presidential imprimatur. These things matter. Otherwise we wouldn’t be so upset, no?
SgrAstar
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): No. Their fear is that undocumented residents are voting via lax registration rules and drivers’ license (= i.d.) availability in states like California. It’s not voter impersonation that worries them, it’s that non-citizens can vote via insufficiently strict registration requirements. Ridiculous, yes…but not to Kobach and his ilk.
Steve in the ATL
@Major Major Major Major:
Throwing around legal terms now?
Off my corner, ho!
Steve in the ATL
@Major Major Major Major:
In ordinary circumstances, yes. But this is the trump presidency. It lacks both prestige and legitimacy.
Major Major Major Major
@Steve in the ATL: catholic school, bitch! We got all up in Latin’s shit
Gretchen
@Adam L Silverman: Yes, what Beth Clarkson has found is quite damning, but she can’t get any traction. She sued to recheck voting machine tapes against reported results, and the judge went into contortions to rule that it would somehow impact voter privacy. So there are tapes, but nobody can look at them, because reasons.
That’s one reason it makes me so mad when people say “Kansas is so stupid they re-elected Brownback. They get what they deserve”. Real Clear Politics showed the dem +2 right before the election, but Brownback won by 3.9. Spread of 6 points? For the Senate, the independent was ahead by 1 in the polls, and lost by 11. That was complicated because the Dem dropped out so as to not drain support from the stronger independent, and the Secretary of State (Kris Kobach) refused to take his name off the ballot until the last minute, to make a Dem win harder. With our touchscreen voting machines, some of which don’t have tapes and the rest have tapes that can’t be reviewed, and a shady Secretary of State, and the statistician saying the totals look rigged, I don’t think it’s our fault that we have Brownback and Roberts and Moran. We don’t have a democracy here, and the courts are fine with that. And, surprise, surprise, Kobach easily won re-election as SOS against a good challenger.
debbie
@SFAW:
If only!
cmorenc
The actual goal most GOP politicians have in mind with voter suppression and aggressive gerrymandering isn’t, in their minds, a fascist or authoritarian state devoid of democratic (the process, not the party) participation. Rather, the model is creation of the sort of persistent single-party domination across a controlling portion of the states of the sort the Democratic party held for 100 years across most of the states of the old Confederacy. Within the party, there were often genuinely competitive electoral contests between different factions or different prominent figures – but winning the party’s primary contest nomination was tantamount to winning the general election, since the Democratic candidate for governor, senator, representative etc generally won by 15-25% over their GOP opponent. The modern GOP would settle for persistent ability to win by high single digits.
THAT SAID, Trump does have notions of exercising fascist types of power and control, to the extent he can get it. And the GOP’s vision of “democracy” is to cut off viable effective political power at the left end at corporate sort-of-moderate republicans, with the controlling center significantly to the right of that. And they will indeed welcome minorities within their ranks, provided they are of the sort like Tim Scott of SC or Nikki Haley (also of SC) or Ben Carson. In other words, minority ethnic figures who may have darker skin, but have mostly assimilated culturally and ideologically with conservative whites.
And yes, they DO want to suppress voting by the sorts of racial or ethnic minorities they perceive as “other”, which includes those they suspect would vote D if allowed to vote. That IS racist and anti-democratic, but of course in conservative white’s thinking, they are the ones being victimized and discriminated against, encouraged by their Fox-watching habits.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
That seems like it would happen regardless. So no biggie I guess.
@Major Major Major Major:
But have you looked at who’s president lately?
debbie
@Gretchen:
She needs a better lawyer. Where’s the ACLU?
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@cmorenc:
But wouldn’t people become suspicious if the unpopular party candidate (GOOPer) always wins by the slimmest of margins election after election? Honestly, I would think that this would only ensure their ultimate destruction because illegimate single party would rule would result in a lot of pissed off people who have no voice in their government rising up to overthrow them.
At that point, the GOP would have to go full on fascist to remain in power.
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: fine, then you have nothing to worry about, happy?
Steve in the ATL
@debbie: the skill of her lawyer is irrelevant when the judge is a right wing hack. As was the case in this, uh, case.
Knight of Nothing
Anyone else think Hans von Spakovsky looks like the Gestapo dude from Raiders of the Lost Ark?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Spakovsky#/media/File:Hans_von_Spakovsky_publicity_shot.jpg
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2879/9264616939_870b373005.jpg
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
Don’t get me wrong, the voting commission scares me for the reasons Adam listed. I just think (or rather hope) that the report won’t be treated seriously.
Jeffro
@schrodingers_cat: I’m pretty sure it’s that plus other stuff (snorted or otherwise ingested)
Jeffro
@debbie: @Adam L Silverman: Say whaaaat? What’s all this about?
Jeffro
@Jeffro: Nevermind…the rest of the thread gave me some direction here. Unbelievable what I’m seeing.
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: Here you go:
http://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article41620107.html
http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article61222187.html
prostratedragon
[sigh] All those who first read the title of this post as “… Flatulent,” signify by saying “Aye.”
Obdurodon
The important thing to remember about people like Kobach and von Spakovsky is that they don’t need to be right. They don’t need to be believed. They don’t give a hoot about either of that because their only purpose is to shift the Overton Window. No matter how times they are revealed to be liars, they succeed if they create an environment where similar claims can be made the next time without immediately being dismissed as the ravings of crackpots. Then they stick in people’s minds as possibilities. Then they’re repeated as truth. Mission accomplished. These guys are just sacrificial pawns, gladly thrown away to create openings for others.
Gretchen
@debbie: I don’t know. She represented herself the first time, and had a guy volunteer to help the second time. She’s a statistics professor at Wichita State and hasn’t been able to drum up much publicity. There have been some stories in the local papers, but not really much interest. Statistics professor sees anomalies that could swing election. Yawn.
Gretchen
@Adam L Silverman: I’m glad to know you’re aware of this far from Kansas. That gives me hope that someday we’ll get people here to see what an outrage this is. I’m afraid it will be after a few more years of misrule, though. Kris Kobach is running for governor while he’s Secretary of State. What are the odds he’ll help his own chances?
Nelle
@Adam L Silverman: coming very late to say that my husband has met with her and finds her credible and her cause worth pursuing. She could use someone with good media and social media skills to help her mount pressure from the public sphere.
Bjacques
I’ve always had trouble with the idea that an illegal alien, whose primary goal is not to get caught, would expose herself to official scrutiny by registering to vote, let alone actually show up at the polling place. Even putative promises of amnesty wouldn’t be much use if the illegal voter is caught and deported. A citizen voting illegally is committing a state or federal crime, so it’s unlikely anyone would bother (hardly anyone, even Republican, turns up legally in local or off-year elections), let alone in numbers that would swing an election.
Retail election fraud is not worth the trouble. Wholesale fraud, on the other hand…to paraphrase Comrade Stalin, it doesn’t matter who votes so much as who counts the votes.
Woodrowfan
never forget, von Spakovsky’s father sided with the Nazi’s in WWII and the son is proud of his service for “fighting communists.”