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Executive Order for Commission on ‘Election Integrity’ Is Voter Suppression
Dictators stay in power by not allowing a vote for their position at all or staging an "election" that is controlled in a manner that pre-determines the results. In the United States, something so brazen seems unimaginable. Wake up. We need to view the executive order to eliminate non-existent voter fraud as directly from a dictator playbook, supported not just by Trump, but by a Republican Party determined to hold onto power at all costs.
Trump has signed an executive order today establishing a commission to review alleged voter fraud and voter suppression in the American election system. Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach were announced today as the Chair and Vice Chair of the bipartisan "Presidential Commission on Election Integrity."
Kobach is a controversial figure for his crusade against voter fraud in the state of Kansas, as well as his role in assisting states in crafting legislation to crackdown on illegal immigration. He also was an architect of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System following the September 11 attacks, which was widely criticized by human rights groups for targeting Muslim immigrants.
Even after becoming President due to the Electoral College, Trump claimed widespread voter fraud explained why Hillary Clinton received over 3 million more votes. Neither Trump nor his team has provided evidence to substantiate the claims which are obviously false.
An ABC News fact-check in January 2017 found the claim about massive widespread voter fraud was disputed by election officials across the country. After contacting officials in all 50 states to ask for the number of voter fraud instances in the 2016 election, the 20 states that responded all said voter fraud was not widespread. Most said “very” or “extremely” rare. In 3 of the country’s 4 most populated states (California, New York and Florida), election officials say they found zero cases of voter fraud this past election. And a study published this month by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law found that 40 in 42 jurisdictions researchers studied, there were no known incidents of non citizens voting in 2016.
Despite what Trump and his advisers say, all of the evidence shows that voter fraud is a very small problem in American elections. The Washington Post found only four documented cases of voter fraud in 2016 out of 135 million votes cast, equal to 0.000002 percent of total votes. A state-based review by David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research found at most a few hundred alleged cases of fraud, nowhere near the millions Trump is claiming. There were just 31 credible cases of voter impersonation from 2000 to 2014 out of more than 1 billion votes cast during that time.
Given the complete lack of evidence of voter fraud, the commission actually designed for one purpose: to perpetuate the myth of fraud in order to lay the groundwork for enacting policies that suppress the vote.
If you want to know what such voter intimidation looks like, take a look at Pence’s home state of Indiana, where state police in October 2016 raided the offices of a group working to register African-American and low-income voters. They seized thousands of voter registration applications, even though only ten were suspected to be fraudulent and no one has been charged.
In Kansas, Kobach has been the driving force within the GOP behind policies that erect new barriers to the ballot box and the most fervent evangelist of unproven voter fraud claims... Kobach alleged that “the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive,” even though there were only 5 alleged cases of non-citizens voting in Kansas during the previous 13 years... That led Kansas to enact a law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.... Since the law went into effect in 2013, 1 in 7 Kansans who attempted to register have had their registrations held “in suspense” by the state. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit blocked a key part of the law last year, ruling that “there was an almost certain risk that thousands of otherwise qualified Kansans would be unable to vote in November.”
Voter fraud is NOT an issue. Voter suppression IS. This executive order is the exact opposite of what is called for.
The 2016 election was the first in fifty years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act and fourteen states had new voting restrictions in effect for the first time... a new study finding that 200,000 votes could have been suppressed by Wisconsin’s strict voter-ID law in 2016. In comparison, Wisconsin didn’t present a single case of voter impersonation in court that the law would’ve stopped.
Ari Berman of The Nation strongly states, "We’re at a very dangerous moment for democracy right now, when the core institutions of our democratic system have repeatedly been attacked by the president of the United States. The director of the FBI was fired, Trump is under FBI investigation, our elections were hacked by a foreign autocracy, judges have been denounced by name, the media is called fake news. And now votes are being suppressed. Saving American democracy is the most urgent fight of the Trump era."
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