July 6, 2017
With every passing day, it is increasingly clear that the Trump administration is engaged in nothing less than an effort to reinstitute Jim Crow on a nationwide basis. If that sounds hyperbolic, we need only examine its recent efforts to curtail voting rights, starting with its so-called Election Integrity Commission. By now, 45 of 50 states have refused to comply with the Commission’s onerous demand for extensive personal information on their voters, including names, addresses, party affiliation, ten year voting history and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. Despite having neither clear authority to request this information nor a demonstrably secure portal through which the information could be sent, the Commission’s letter demanded that states turn over the information within sixteen days.
It is difficult to see what positive aims could be achieved by such a massive data dump of highly sensitive personal information. Trump cleared up any ambiguity about the Commission’s purpose when he lambasted states’ refusal to provide information to the “voter fraud” commission. In addition, given that the vice chair is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a staunch anti-immigrant zealot who advocates for strict voter i.d. laws, it is clear that this commission is nothing more than an effort to federalize the patchwork of voter suppression laws in various states, in order to deprive Americans of our constitutional rights more efficiently.
The Commission in all likelihood wants information to feed into the maw of the voter suppression software tool, Crosscheck. Crosscheck scans voter rolls for duplicate names in more than one state. A Stanford University study found that for every genuine duplicate voter name turned up by Crosscheck, the system turned up 200 false positives. We can be sure that Republicans are salivating at the prospect of a bloodless way to eliminate Democratic voters from the rolls at a ratio of 200 to 1.
While there has been an understandable focus on the Election Integrity Commission, another move made by the Justice Department may have flown under the radar. Last Wednesday, the DOJ sent a letter to several states requesting information on their compliance with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Although the “Motor Voter” Act was passed with the aim of easing registration, the Justice Department letter was only concerned with states’ procedures for removing voters from the rolls. (Source: “This DOJ Letter May Be More Alarming than Trump Commission’s Request for Voter Data,” Sam Levine, Huff Post, 7/5/17). According to David Becker, former Justice Department lawyer tasked with enforcement of the NVRA, such a request is unprecedented.
Taken together, these two actions make it clear that the administration is laying the groundwork for a massive, nationwide voter purge targeting Black, Latino and Democratic voters. The myth of “voter fraud” has been repeatedly debunked, yet the radical right resurrects the chimera every election cycle as a convenient cover for its voter suppression tactics.
Saddled with unpopular policy ideas and facing down declining demographic relevance, the aging, narrow minded right wing knows that it can only retain power by cheating and deception. In the face of the unresolved Russian investigation and the unprecedented number of avowed white supremacists in the Trump administration, we must demand that our Secretaries of State refuse to comply with these blatant efforts to deprive citizens of the Constitutional right that is preservative of all other rights.
We must call out these Klan like tactics for what they are – a frontal assault on the voting rights of people of color—and resist them in every way possible.
#ElectionIntegrityCommission; #VoterSuppression