Why we should be very afraid of Trump’s vote suppression commission
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/06/30/why-we-should-be-very-afraid-of-trumps-vote-suppression-commission/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.c7c55ea99e0e

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.

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If you aren’t familiar with him, Kris Kobach has made a crusade out of denying people the right to vote, particularly racial minorities (I recommend this recent profile of Kobach by Ari Berman). Kobach, who is running for governor in Kansas, is currently the only secretary of state who has the power to prosecute voter fraud, a power he was granted by the Kansas legislature after convincing them that thousands upon thousands of people were voting illegally in the state. But as Berman reports:

Though Kobach received the authority to prosecute fraud cases after warning that voting by ‘aliens’ was rampant, the nine convictions he has won since 2015 have primarily been citizens 60 and over who own property in two states and were confused about voting requirements. Only one noncitizen has been convicted.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Kansans have been blocked from registering by the 2011 law he championed that requires documentary proof of citizenship in order to register.

In addition, Kobach is apparently planning to use a Homeland Security database of non-citizens — visa holders, green card holders, and the like — to flag voters to be purged. At this point you might be asking: Won’t all this affect Republicans, too? It will, but when done on a sufficiently broad scale, this is a numbers game that works to Republicans’ benefit. Let’s say there’s a green card holder named Hector Gonzales who was born on April 3rd, and they find 75 different voters named Hector Gonzales with that birthday around the country and purge them all on the dubious grounds that they all might be that one non-citizen Hector Gonzales. Even if there are a few Republicans born on April 3rd named Hector Gonzales who lose their voting rights, the GOP will come out ahead, since most of those Hector Gonzalezes are probably Democrats.

The same is true of voter ID laws. Some Republicans may be unable to find their birth certificates and be disenfranchised, but everyone knows that Democrats are affected more. One statistical analysis found that “strict ID laws cause a reduction in Democratic turnout by 8.8 percentage points, compared to a reduction of 3.6 percentage points for Republicans.” So the math works out in the GOP’s favor.

Let’s be clear: the sole purpose of this commission on “election integrity” is to suppress votes and give the GOP a structural advantage in every election. It’s being led by Kris Kobach, whose twin missions in life are to scale back immigration and to make voting more difficult. Other commission members include Ken Blackwell, a far-right activist who as secretary of state of Ohio in 2004 (while he was simultaneously serving as state co-chair of the Bush campaign) tried to disenfranchise people whose registration forms were submitted on insufficiently heavy paper stock. The administration just added Hans von Spakovsky, who before Kobach emerged was known as the country’s most prominent advocate of vote suppression.

These people are not trying to determine whether there are problems with our voting system and find the best solutions to those problems. They have come together to promote the myth of voter fraud and enable vote suppression in order to advantage the Republican Party. No one should be fooled into thinking this enterprise is anything other than that.