TRUMP’S VOTER INTEGRITY COMMISSION ADDS ATTORNEY KNOWN FOR VOTER PURGES

…Kris Kobach, Commission Vice Chair that led ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) in writing voter ID laws across the country

 

Trump’s Voter Integrity Commission is worse than expected.

 

The White House continues to offer negative statements about those states refusing to hand over data to the their “Presidential Commission on Election Integrity”. They refer to the number of states by organizations such as CNN, the Associated Press and The Post, telling of those states refusing to turn over their voter data as Trump’s  “fake news”.  Kris Kobach, the Commission’s vice-chair said: “At present, 45 states and the District of Columbia have refused the Commission’s request for publicly available voter information.  Despite media distortions and obstruction by a handful of state politicians,” Kobach added, “this bipartisan commission on election integrity will continue its work to gather the facts through public records requests to ensure the integrity of each American’s vote because the public has a right to know.”

 

I was under the mistaken impression that Donald Trump’s ridiculous “voter integrity” commission couldn’t possibly get any worse. I now stand corrected.

 

President Donald Trump has now announced that J. Christian Adams, a conservative attorney who has spearheaded efforts around the country to purge voters from the rolls, he is now joining the president’s commission to investigate the false concept of US voter fraud.

After leaving a post in the Voting Section of the Bush Department of Justice, Adams began a quest to purge voter rolls across the country. As detailed by Mother Jones news, Adams has sent threatening letters and filed several lawsuits against counties that he claims have too many names on the voter rolls. Of course, his actions largely target rural counties with large minority populations, and most of the counties that Adam’s has selected do not have the legal or financial resources to put up much of a fight.  However, Adams and his former colleagues have recently also began targeting areas with large Democratic populations in swing states as well.  (Thanks to "Citizens United", they must be getting more income to support these nefarious efforts.)

 

Trump has also been hatching voter suppression plans across the states with this new voter fraud commission group

 

Sherrilyn Ifill, president and Director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, talked with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about why Donald Trump’s history and the people he is putting on his voter fraud commission point to a goal of suppressing voter participation.

 

Now, I knew I had head the name "J. Christian Adams", and then I remembered that it had crossed my radar some years ago.  After he had joined the Bush/Cheney Justice Department, Adams rose to prominence as the “chief agitator” behind the ridiculous New Black Panther Party story.  Yes, he was the point man that alleged that two black men with braided-beards had been intimidating white people while loitering outside a Philadelphia voting precinct in 2008.  This was proven to be a false claim.

 

In the years that followed, Adams began “pushing restrictive elections laws and he supported voter purges across the country.”

 

Adams has now been taken on by the Trump White House to serve on their bogus voting commission.  This organization only exists because the president’s feelings were hurt when he lost the nation’s popular vote by 3 million fewer votes than his opponent.  He has vowed to prove that 3 million Americans voted illegally, even though there is not one shred of proof.

 

Adams joins a major motley crew of voter-suppression pioneers, which already includes the voter-suppression king, Kris Kobach, plus Hans von Spakovsky and Ken Blackwell. They are all known as super-conservative operatives that have been supporting false voter fraud claims for years.

 

Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at UC Irvine, has written: “It is hard to imagine a list of people less credible on the issue of the extent of voter fraud in the United States, and who have done more to raise the scourge of voter fraud as a means to advocate for laws to make it harder for people to register and to vote. This is not a list meant to inspire bipartisan cooperation on fixing election administration. It is assembling a rogues’ gallery of vote suppression.”  Hear, Hear!!!!

 

At least for now, however, the work of this rogues’ gallery is on hold. . 

 

Donald Trump’s election integrity commission has paused its collection of voter data in response to the latest in a series of lawsuits and complaints alleging the task force is breaking the law.  The abrupt halt in data collection is a direct response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center which alleges that the commission is violating the E-Government Act of 2002.  This act requires federal agencies to establish data protections before collecting personal information using information technology.

 

 

There is also a move against the commission from a grass-roots ground swell against any organization having all the nations voter records in one location, on one computer system.  This would be a great operation for being hacked by Russia or other nations that don't believe in free countries and a government determined by a voting public.  It is a good thing to have elections run by 50 separate state organizations and 50 separate systems.
 

The Southern states, of course, have historically had more antagonistic relationships with voters and with a central government. This dates back to well before the Civil War, but the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, now explains the more recent context of the “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico” statement from Mississippi’s chief election officer to the new commission.  “In 2014, the Texas-based organization True the Vote and some Mississippi residents sued the state, Hosemann, and the state Republican Party seeking birth dates of Mississippi voters.  This was after Chris McDaniel's primary loss to incumbent US Sen. Thad Cochran. The state claimed voter's birth dates were private. The lawsuit claimed they fall under federal voting laws on disclosure. A specially appointed federal judge sided with the state and Hosemann.”

 

Whether you substantively agree with these Trump voter suppression guys is beside the point.  They are demonstrating ideological consistency in an era of rampant partisanship.  This is also when many Republican politicians keep their fingers in the wind and change their positions like twisted pretzels to match whatever Fox’s Sean Hannity has to say on Fox News.

 

It takes real steel to go against these guys, especially since the president remains overwhelmingly popular with his Republican base, even though that’s only 35-40% of the nation’s voters, (but that is shrinking).  Trump has also been lashing out at the states going against his voter commission’s goals on his favorite communication tool: Twitter!

 

You had better be prepared for this to be the Trump approach against America's voters throughout his White House tenure.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017