Leading Off
● Voter Suppression: In May, Donald Trump created a “Voting Integrity Commission” that we knew was purely a pretext to promote voter suppression nationwide. Now this panel has launched its opening salvo and confirmed its true purpose. The board is proposing to scrutinize each state’s voter registration records and intimidate the states into conducting voter purges—and it’s named America’s most prominent voter-fraud scaremonger to the commission itself. These actions are designed to give Trump and congressional Republicans an excuse to impose new voting restrictions at the national level.
Led by vice chair Kris Kobach, Kansas’ Republican secretary of state and one of the country’s foremost crusaders for voting restrictions, Trump’s commission has requested that every state send in its voter registration records in their entirety. For some states, these records would include voters’ names, addresses, birth dates, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, party affiliation, the history of which elections they’ve voted in over the last decade, their registration status in another state, their military status, and whether they have felony convictions—in other words, quite a lot of personal information.
Although registration information is technically public, states have restrictions on with whom it can be shared and how, given the obvious privacy concerns with such sensitive data. While the federal government already has access to some of these statistics for every voter, the commission itself is required to make all documents it receives available to the general public, which would effectively defeat the attempts that the states have made to safeguard this information.
Kobach will likely abuse these registration records to demonstrate examples of the same person voting more than once in an attempt to claim that voter fraud is widespread. These examples will be bogus, though. Kobach has done this very same thing with his national “Crosscheck” system, which he’s convinced over 30 states to adopt. Crosscheck is notoriously riddled with inaccurate information, since it often compares just a few data points to suss out duplicate registrations, such as name and birthdate, leading to many false positives. (How many guys do you want to bet are named James Smith with a birthday of April 20? A lot, no doubt.) Election experts have estimated that Crosscheck could disenfranchise 200 valid voters for every one actual case of double registration that it eliminates.
Many Democratic state elections officials have refused Kobach's request, while even a few Republicans have said they will only comply with the legal bare minimum and won't submit private data. (Operative Matt Berg is keeping track of all the responses.) In a fitting ironic twist of incompetence, Kobach himself is unable to supply all of the requested information because of Kansas state law. Unfortunately, Kobach will likely enough get the information he needs from more pliant Republican officials in order to be able to falsely claim that voting irregularities are widespread.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2sabsfj
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment