POLITIFACT - Trump: Democrats “are trying to ban voter ID”

"Trump says Democrats are trying to 'ban voter ID.' That’s misleading.'” by Amy Sherman, PolitiFact 1/11/2022

As Democrats renew their efforts to pass federal voting rights legislation, former President Donald Trump suggested that Democrats want to erase state laws that require identification in order to cast a ballot.

"They are trying to BAN voter ID and other basic measures that can ensure the sacred integrity of the vote," Trump said Jan. 7 in an email from his Save America PAC.

Trump accused Democrats of trying to "pass a radical federal takeover of state election law."

Trump didn’t name any specific bills, and a spokesperson Liz Harrington told us he was "not referring to any legislation."

But Harrington pointed to the House Democrats’ support for the HEROES Act in May 2020.  It was a $3 trillion proposal by House Democrats that focused on aid to governments and businesses and included stimulus checks.  Tucked into that legislation was a provision that said voters could meet a state’s voter ID requirement by signing a sworn written statement attesting to their identity.  The provision did not apply to certain first-time voters who registered by mail.

The voter ID proposal drew criticism from Republicans at the time, but the focus of discussions was about the main provisions of the bill, which aimed to help Americans get through the pandemic.  The legislation passed the Democratic-led House mostly along party lines but didn’t pass the Senate.

Democrats tried to pass a similar voter ID proposal within an expansive voting rights bill, H.R. 1, but the bill never made it into law.  The latest comprehensive bill that addresses voter ID is the Senate Democrats’ Freedom to Vote Act.  Senate Republicans blocked the bill last fall.

The Freedom to Vote Act also includes a requirement that states offer a workaround for voters who lack IDs, but it doesn’t broadly "ban" ID requirements.  Rather, it would set an expansive and uniform policy for what counts as an acceptable ID; it wouldn’t have to be one with a photo such as a driver’s license.  It does contain a provision, however, that would prohibit states from requiring voters present an ID in order to get an absentee ballot.

"I don’t know that ban is the right word, but it certainly makes it hard to put in place strict voter identification rules, especially those that make it harder for minority voters to vote," said Rick Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, law professor who specializes in election law.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that he wants to create a path forward for federal voting rights legislation by Jan. 17.  To proceed on the Freedom to Vote Act or other voting rights legislation, Democrats would have to persuade Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to support changes to the filibuster, and would need every Democratic vote in the evenly split chamber.

Support for voter ID rules

Thirty-five states have laws asking voters to show some form of identification at the polls, while the remaining states use other identifying information when voters cast ballots, such as a signature, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

Polls show most people support a voter ID requirement, but voting rights advocates say that these polls may not grasp the issue’s nuances — such as safeguards that are already in place — and that the trend toward stricter ID rules could make it harder for a small group of voters to cast ballots.  This leaves Democrats seeking to stem the tide of increasingly strict rules, without proposing a total ban on voter ID requirements.

How voter ID requirements vary by state

What bothers some voting rights advocates is what’s in the mix of allowable options for acceptable IDs.  In Texas and Tennessee, for example, gun permits are considered valid voter IDs, but student IDs are not.  Critics say this makes it easy for gun owners, a heavily Republican group, to vote but harder for students, a predominantly Democratic group.

Also, voters who lack government-issued IDs tend to be nonwhite, and that includes in places where elections are settled by slim margins such as Georgia.

Republicans who want stricter voter ID rules argue that they are needed to prevent voter fraud.  But voter fraud is rare.  An AP investigation in December found fewer than 475 potential cases in six battleground states in the 2020 election, not nearly enough to affect the outcome.  "Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots," the AP reported.

OPINION - Brooks and Capehart 6/25/2021

"Brooks and Capehart on Biden infrastructure deal, crime plan, Georgia lawsuit" PBS NewsHour 6/25/2021

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week in politics, including the potential breakthrough on the road to an infrastructure deal, the justice department's lawsuit against Georgia's voting restrictions, and the President's plan to curb surging violent crime across the country.

Judy Woodruff (NewsHour):  And now, at the end of a full week of news, we are so fortunate to have the analysis of Brooks and Capehart.  That is New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Jonathan Capehart, columnist for The Washington Post.

It is very good to see both of you on this — as it is on every Friday.

Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post:  Great to see you.

David Brooks, New York Times:  Good to see you.

(LAUGHTER)

Judy Woodruff:  A lot happened this week in Washington, Jonathan.

But I do want to start with this, do we have one or do we not have an infrastructure deal?

Yesterday, the President kind of made the unprecedented move of coming out on the driveway with a group of Democrats and Republicans, announced that there was an agreement, but then a couple of hours later, he said there's only an agreement if Democrats — if I get from Congress the spending plan.

Jonathan Capehart:  Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of consternation clearly right now within the Republican Party, and particularly among those Senators, about what happened.

But the deal, such as it is, last I saw, is still holding.  It's still there.  I think you have had senators like Senator Blunt, Senator Portman, even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who, in the past, said we want a hard infrastructure deal, but I — we see that the President will probably go reconciliation for these other things, and that's fine.

The rub is the President and the speaker of the House both saying, OK, we will go for this deal, but you have got to do reconciliation also.

That's why the Republicans are angry.  But everybody needs a deal.  The President wants one.  The Republicans want one, because they need something to go back to their constituents and say, look, this is what we have delivered for you.

Judy Woodruff:  And, David, the White House, the President, they're saying, well, the President made it clear all along that he was going to want this, but it seems to be a little fuzzy.

David Brooks:  Sort of.

You know, I think everyone knew there were going to be two bills.  There was going to be — well, we didn't know.  But the White House, to their credit, worked really hard to get this bipartisan compromise, all the calls, all the meetings.  It looked like real legislation, the kind of stuff Joe Biden was born for.

And so we get this deal, against all the odds.  It was unexpected.  The Republicans knew there was going to be a reconciliation deal.  What they didn't know, I think, is that he [Biden] was going to threaten to veto the compromise if he didn't get the second.

And so it was that linkage that I think took a lot of Republicans by surprise, and not only the — I mean, ones who really believe in the deal, the Rob Portmans of the world and people like that.

So, I do think, from what we know, they are right to feel a little aggrieved.  Will they walk out on it?  Well, Senator Coons from Delaware told Politico this afternoon that, so far, they have had conversations, bipartisan, and they haven't walked out on the deal.

Now, a couple people, Lindsey Graham and others, one other, have shown some willingness to walk out of the deal.  And if they do that, then you don't have 10 Republicans in the Senate, and you can't pass the deal.

But, like Jonathan says, so far, they're hanging in there.  And there's a whole bunch of strategy I can imagine about how they're going to try to sink the reconciliation later.  It's a strategist's dream, this complicated procedure.

(LAUGHTER)

David Brooks:  But, so far, I think they have damaged the deal, but they haven't killed the deal.

Judy Woodruff:  But your sense is that it's going to hold, you think?

Jonathan Capehart:  Yes, I think it will hold.

And, really, does anyone think that Republicans are going to vote in favor of the reconciliation deal?  I think the reconciliation deal, it's a given that the 50 Republicans aren't going to vote for it.

What it really is about is trying to hold Senators Manchin and Sinema and maybe some unnamed others to…

Judy Woodruff:  Democrats.

Jonathan Capehart:  Democrats — to ensure that they vote for reconciliation, so that everybody's happy.

David Brooks:  And the Republicans are trying to get Manchin and Sinema to break the linkage and say, we won't sign on unless you do this alone.

To me, the fun will be when the Democrats start fighting amongst themselves.  I mean, say the moderate — this compromise passes.  Then we have got the reconciliation.  The progressives want this big $6 trillion thing.  Manchin probably wants less than $2 trillion.

And so they all agree on the taxes.  They do not agree on where the spending should go.  And that's how the bigger thing could fall apart.

Judy Woodruff:  Well, speaking of Senator Manchin, he played a critical role in another issue that we saw this week.  It seems like it was a long time ago, but it was only Monday, Jonathan…

Jonathan Capehart:  Right.

Judy Woodruff:  … when voting rights came up in the Senate, and the Republicans blocked what the Democrats were trying to do.

This was after Senator Manchin, same Joe Manchin who's involved in infrastructure, said he would — was on board with a kind of a compromise.

I guess my question now is, here, today, you have the Department of Justice announcing it's going to sue the state of Georgia over its new voting laws.  Where are we on voting rights in this country?

Jonathan Capehart:  Well, I think, right now, where we are in voting rights is, there's not going to be any quick legislative fix.  Everyone was focused on the For the People Act as the immediate thing that could be done to stop or blunt what was happening in the states like Georgia.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Act is — hasn't even been introduced.  So that's way down the road.  I think, right now, the focus is going to be on, what can the Justice Department do, what can the administration do to blunt the impact of Georgia and what — and these other states?

And so that's what we saw today, the Justice Department suing Georgia to stop its law.  I think that's where the action.  Until the filibuster is done away with, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer comes along and says, OK, here's the For the People Act again, where it can pass by a simple majority, that bill's not going to go anywhere.

So it's imperative, really, for the Justice Department to weigh in.

Judy Woodruff:  How do you see it?

David Brooks:  I guess I see it that way, though it's not clear to me why people in Congress can't just scale back.

I mean, some of the voting rights that were the H.R.1 and all that seemed to me way overly broad.  And Manchin had a proposal.  Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, had a proposal.  Maybe something could be scaled back, but nobody seems to be talking about that way.  So we do seem to be going to the courts.

I guess there's going to be a Supreme Court ruling on the Arizona voting some time maybe next week.

Judy Woodruff:  Right.

Jonathan Capehart:  Right.

Judy Woodruff:  Soon.

David Brooks:  And, to me, I'm fine with that.

We heard such different things about the Georgia — Joe Biden called it the new Jim Crow.  Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State there, who seems like a legit guy, totally disagreed.  And so if the courts decide, does this discriminate against African-Americans, I'm happy to have — make that decision.

I hate having the federal government involved in state voting procedures.  But if one party is trying to disenfranchise a race of people, I think American history has established this is when the federal government gets involved.

So I'm happy to see — let the courts make a determination, was there intent to discriminate here?

Judy Woodruff:  And, Jonathan, Democrats are arguing that Republicans are trying to deny people on a massive scale from voting.

Jonathan Capehart:  Right, on a massive scale, which is why Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department's taking the actions — the action that it took today.

Judy Woodruff:  And I guess my question, though, is, whatever the Supreme Court rules, it's — it looks like this is something that's frozen in the Congress.  I mean, it's not going anywhere.

Jonathan Capehart:  Yes.  No, it's completely frozen.

Until the filibuster — something is done about the filibuster…

Judy Woodruff:  Our favorite Senate maneuver, the filibuster.

Jonathan Capehart:  Right.

Until it's reformed or eliminated or what have you, that bill, the For the People Act, is not going to go anywhere.

Judy Woodruff:  So, David, another — we talked about what a busy week — this was also the week that President Biden rolled out his plan for addressing in a number of different ways gun crime, violent crime.

The homicide rate is way up last year over the year before and this year way up again.  Does this look like — I mean, it's a multipronged approach, a lot of different initiatives they're laying out there.  But does it look like something that could make a difference?

David Brooks:  Well, it's tough for a President to control crime.  It is mostly an issue — but it's going to be a big voting issue, no question.  We have already seen that in the New York Democratic primary, where the crime was the issue.

Voters, especially in places like Minneapolis, Portland, they are saying this has become a crisis level.  People have different explanations for why it is, partly COVID, economic stress, police pullback.

And so I do think all these things make it imperative to act.  I would give the Biden administration maybe a B-minus.  I mean, I support gun control.  I'm not sure it's a crime or a homicide reduction measure very effectively.

I'm for some police reform.  I'm glad they're using COVID money to allow police forces to increase the number of officers.  There's clear evidence that, if you increase the number of police, you get less crime.  And — but that has to be accompanied by police reform.

And so you have got to do a bunch of things all at once to have a just way to reduce crime that's not penalty on the local communities.  And that takes involvement on multiple fronts.  And I thought this was a vague gesture, more than that kind of intense involvement.

Judy Woodruff:  A vague gesture?

Jonathan Capehart:  I don't know about vague gesture.

I mean, you are right.  Presidents have no impact whatsoever on state and local — excuse me — state and local crime issues.  But people look to the President to do something.  And I agree with David.  The $350 billion from the America CARES Act to localities to do something related to crime is a very good thing.

But we have to remember that, yes, crime has ticked up this year over last year and last year over the year before.  But we are way, way down from the bad years of the '90s.

And let me just give you quickly — New York City murders, in 1990, 2,262, in 2020, 468, a 79 percent reduction.  Robberies in 1990, 100,280; 2020, robberies in New York City, 13,108.  That's an 86.9 percent reduction.

So, crime — yes, crime is ticking up over the last couple of years.  But we are nowhere near where we were 30 years ago, when it was really bad.

Judy Woodruff:  And I should have clarified.  Homicides are way up.  Violent crime is up a little…

Jonathan Capehart:  Right, violent crime, right.

Judy Woodruff:  … and other crime.  It's more of a mixed picture.

But, David, it just — people keep asking, as you say, even though the President can't reach in and control what goes on in handling the crime in individual cities, what example is he setting?  What is he saying to lead us?

David Brooks:  Well, I think he's made some progress.

Yes, I think we both lived through New York in that period.  And crime was terrible there.  It was terrible.  It was something we all lived with and all endured.

I think one of the things he's done, at least go — take us away from last summer's belief that there was such thing as a free lunch.  You could defund the police or reduce the police and not have some after-effect.  When a party tells you there's no free lunch, whether it's on tax policy, fiscal policy, criminal policy, they're almost always wrong.

And so if you just let the police pull back and not get involved, you're going to get more crime.  So, we got to do two things at once.

Judy Woodruff:  We're going to leave it there.  Come back and see you guys next Friday.

(LAUGHTER)

Jonathan Capehart:  All right.

Judy Woodruff:  David Brooks, Jonathan Capehart, thank you both.

Jonathan Capehart:  Thanks, Judy.

Judy Woodruff:  Have a good weekend.

VOTER SUPPRESSION LAWS - Republican States Make a Run For One-Party Rule

"Wave of new voting laws raises questions about voter access and integrity" PBS NewsHour 6/9/2021

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Since the 2020 election, laws restricting voter access passed in 14 states across the U.S., all with Republican-controlled state legislatures.  They've sparked outrage from voting rights groups and from two former co-chairs of the Presidential Election Commission.  Democrat Bob Bauer who served under the Obama campaign, and Ben Ginsberg a Republican election lawyer, join Judy Woodruff to discuss.

 

 

"Texas increasingly at odds with the Biden administration on critical issues" PBS NewsHour 6/10/2021

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The past legislative session in Texas focused on key conservative priorities, from restricting abortion to addressing transgender rights.  The Lone Star State is now focused on a voting bill that would tighten election laws, after missing an opportunity to get it passed late last month.  Political reporter Daniel Bush joins Judy Woodruff from Austin with more.

VOTE 2020 - Trump Voting Intimidation?

"Trump’s suggestion of deploying law enforcement officials to monitor polls raises specter of voting intimidation" by Rosalind S. Helderman, Josh Dawsey, Matt Zapotosky - The Washington Post 8/21/2020

More than 30 years ago, a Republican Party program that dispatched off-duty police officers to patrol polling places in heavily Black and Latino neighborhoods in New Jersey triggered accusations of voter intimidation, resulting in a federal agreement that restricted for decades how the national GOP could observe voting.

Now, two years after those limits were lifted, President Trump has revived the idea of using law enforcement officers to patrol polling places, invoking tactics historically used to scare voters of color.

In an interview Thursday with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump described law enforcement officers as part of a phalanx of authorities he hopes will monitor voting in November.

“We’re going to have everything,” the President said.  “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to hopefully have U.S. attorneys and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals.  But it’s very hard.”

Trump’s remarks are part of a pattern of comments in which he has suggested he is willing to take actions to impede how people cast their ballots this fall.  He has repeatedly sought to undermine confidence in the November vote, making false claims about the integrity of mail-in balloting and raising the specter of widespread electoral fraud.  Earlier this month, he floated the idea of withholding election money from states and refusing funding for the U.S. Postal Service so as to curtail the use of voting by mail.

The President has limited authority to order law enforcement to patrol polling places.  Sheriff’s deputies and police officers are commanded at the local level, and a federal law bars U.S. government officials from sending “armed men” to the vicinity of polling places.

But civil rights advocates said they feared Trump’s words could inspire local officials to act on his behalf.  And they said even the threat of encountering police officers at the polls could be frightening to some voters, particularly in communities of color where residents are distrustful of the police.

“This is just such an old, dirty voter suppression tactic,” said Kristen Clarke, who leads the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.  “There is no doubt that this is about instilling fear and depressing participation in communities of color.”

Clarke said her group was researching how the President’s comments could be used in lawsuits intended to protect the vote.

Attorney Marc Elias, who is leading the Democratic Party’s voting litigation efforts, said he will rush to court if he sees any evidence of the actions Trump described.

“The reason why the Republican Party was under a consent decree for 40 years was for precisely this kind of behavior in 1981,” he said.  “It would be unfortunate if, having come out from under that consent decree, they now try to repeat those tactics.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on Trump’s remarks.

Mike Reed, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said that law enforcement officers are not part of the RNC’s new poll-watching program.  “Our program consists of volunteers and attorneys,” he said.

Other Republican officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy said they were unaware of plans to deploy law enforcement officers to polling places, adding that the President’s comments were inaccurate and unhelpful to the party’s efforts to expand its poll-watching program through appropriate and legal measures.

Matthew Morgan, general counsel for Trump’s reelection campaign, said in a statement that “Republicans will be ready to make sure the polls are being run correctly, securely, and transparently as we work to deliver the free and fair election Americans deserve.”

The Voting Rights Act outlaws the intimidation or coercion of voters, a provision adopted to combat long-standing tactics that were used in the Jim Crow South to prevent Black people from participating in elections.  The tactics included deploying sheriff’s deputies and police officers to the polls.

Accusations of voter intimidation continued long past the end of Jim Crow.  Black voters in Florida complained about police traffic stops on Election Day as recently as 2000, according to a report on the 2000 Presidential election by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.  In 2010, advocates accused North Carolina police of voter suppression after they set up traffic checkpoints between primarily Black apartment complexes and polling locations.

The RNC came under scrutiny for allegedly violating the Voting Rights Act in New Jersey’s 1981 gubernatorial race, when the party was accused of creating a “National Ballot Security Task Force” made up of off-duty deputy sheriffs and local police officers who wore armbands and patrolled the polls in largely Black and Latino neighborhoods.  Some allegedly displayed their firearms.  Official-looking signs were posted at some precincts warning that voter fraud is a crime and that the task force was watching.

After the Democratic Party sued, the RNC entered into a federal consent decree in 1982 in which it admitted no wrongdoing but promised it would not take efforts to suppress the minority vote and would allow courts to review and approve future ballot security efforts.

In practice, that meant that for decades, the RNC largely ceded poll-watching activities to a candidate’s campaign operations.

In 2016, the Democratic Party alleged that the RNC had violated the consent decree by supporting the Trump campaign’s ballot security efforts.

But a federal judge ruled in 2018 that the Democrats had not proved that the agreement had been violated, allowing the consent decree to expire.

As a result, the RNC this year will be able to conduct poll-watching activities without restrictions for the first time in decades.

In response, party officials have said they hope to recruit at least 30,000 poll watchers in 15 battleground states, part of a program that will also deploy lawyers around the country to fight Democrats in court over election laws and ballots.

Justin Riemer, the RNC’s chief counsel, said volunteers will be trained on local rules and on looking for potential voting problems or fraud.  At times, he said, the ballot watchers may confront issues directly with poll workers or may call their problems in to a team of election lawyers back at state headquarters.  He said volunteers also will be trained to observe local officials as they count mail-in votes.

Some GOP poll watchers will be stationed in communities that have traditionally seen long lines or other voting day problems, which Riemer acknowledged would be likely to include some Democratic-leaning urban polling sites with many voters of color.

“Where do you see those lines wrapped around the block on Election Day?” he said.  “Those are the kinds of places we are going to be.  There is usually something wrong.”

Riemer said other poll watchers would focus on GOP-leaning areas, where they can monitor who has not yet voted as the day progresses to help the party better target its get-out-the-vote efforts.

RNC officials say they have developed training programs for poll watchers, though they declined to provide details or copies of the materials.

The consent decree significantly hampered the party’s political activities for years, Riemer said, and, as a result, the RNC plans to be extremely careful not to run afoul of laws against intimidation.

“People here are so vigilant that we are not put under another consent decree,” he said.  “Our volunteers will be beaten over the head that they need to be compliant with all applicable laws, and they need to be respectful and courteous when they are engaging in their operations.”

He added: “They are not there to stop people from voting.  We want people to vote.  If they don’t believe us, they don’t believe us.  That’s the God’s honest truth.”

Such assertions are viewed with skepticism by voting rights activists, particularly since the RNC has amplified Trump’s unfounded claims that voting by mail could lead to rampant fraud.

Many activists think long lines are driven in part by GOP-backed efforts to limit early voting or reduce the number of polling sites.

They also note that Republicans have said that they are open to recruiting former military service members and law enforcement officers as poll watchers — a proposal not far removed from the President’s suggestion to send sheriffs to the polls.

“We would be foolish not to be vigilant,” said Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, noting the country’s history of voter intimidation and the President’s misleading rhetoric.

Gupta, who is President of the nonprofit Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said she expected that Trump would threaten to deploy law enforcement officials to the polls.

“The danger is whether the threat alone or the posturing dissuades voters,” she said.  “That’s where voters really need to be empowered and educated — the best way to fight back is to do the opposite and register and vote.”

Still, she noted that the country has “long-standing laws” prohibiting law enforcement intimidation of voters.  Several states have their own statutes severely restricting police activity near polls.

But in the current fraught political atmosphere, the President’s call for a robust poll-watching effort could lead to unpredictable results.

Earlier this year, a conservative organization called True the Vote was recruiting former members of the military to go to polling places, according to Ed Hiner, a retired Navy SEAL who said he started the group’s “Continue to Serve” program.

Hiner said in an interview that he used the email lists from veterans associations to invite 2 million former military personnel to participate.  He said he thought the program would be a bipartisan effort that would pair Democratic and Republican veterans to encourage voting, and stopped working with the group this summer after realizing how partisan the issues related to voting have become.

A representative of True the Vote, which alleges on its website that “radicalized leftist organizations are hard at work exploiting the weaknesses of our elector process,” did not respond to questions about the program’s status.

According to guidelines distributed by the Justice Department, the states — rather than the federal government — are to ensure the voting process is conducted fairly.  The guidelines instruct federal prosecutors to minimize their public presence around elections, even if they suspect crimes, such as voter fraud, are occurring.

In a 2017 election crimes guide, the department stated that prosecutors and the FBI need approval before they can take any action that requires “intrusion by federal investigators into the area immediately surrounding an open polling place.”

Because federal law also does not allow federal officials to station “armed men” in the vicinity of polling places, the Justice Department has determined that this means a U.S. attorney cannot order FBI agents or U.S. marshals to the polls.

The Justice Department does, however, deploy unarmed, specially trained observers and poll monitors — though the number of those people has declined because of a 2013 Supreme Court decision limiting the federal government’s role inside polling places on Election Day.

“Law enforcement’s first obligation around elections is to do no harm,” Elias said.  “So there is an appropriate role of law enforcement to ensure other people’s conduct isn’t preventing people from voting.  It is not to engage in conduct themselves that could prevent people from voting.”

Correction:  An earlier version of this story misstated how many years it has been since the Republican Party was accused of voter intimidation in New Jersey.  It was more than 30 years ago, not nearly 30 years ago.  This story has been updated.

VOTE 2020 - Deeply Flawed Voting Systems

"In Georgia, primary election chaos highlights a voting system deeply flawed" PBS NewsHour 6/22/2020

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Georgia experienced major problems with its voting processes during a primary election earlier in June.  People waited in line up to eight hours to cast ballots, and poll workers struggled with new machines on which they hadn’t been trained due to the pandemic.  What do Georgia’s election issues mean for other state primaries -- and for American democracy more broadly?  Miles O’Brien reports.

RIGHT TO VOTE 2018 - Voter Suppression in Georgia and Other States

IMHO:  On one issue, it should be un-constitutional for any person who has control over voting in a state, AND is running for an elected office, to be in charge of voting.

"In Georgia and other key midterm states, fears persist over potential voter suppression" PBS NewsHour 11/1/2018

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Amid record-breaking early voting this midterm season, concerns of voter suppression are at the center of some of the country's most contested races.  Lisa Desjardins reports on what new voting restrictions mean for voters in Georgia, North Dakota, and Kansas.

VOTER SUPPRESSION - Restrictive Voting and Minorities

"How restrictive voting requirements target minorities" PBS NewsHour 10/16/2018

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Weeks before the 2018 midterm elections, concerns remain about possible voter suppression tactics in various regions of the U.S.  Why do voter roll purges, voter ID requirements and poll shutdowns disproportionately affect minority communities?  Emory University professor Carol Anderson joins Amna Nawaz to explain why these aggressive measures seek to solve a voter fraud problem that doesn't exist.

AMERICAN POLITICS - Kansas Voter Suppression Case

"How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed" by Jessica Huseman, ProPublica 6/19/2018

From a new Supreme Court ruling to a census question about citizenship, the campaign against illegal registration is thriving.  But when the top proponent was challenged in a Kansas courtroom to prove that such fraud is rampant, the claims went up in smoke.

In the end, the decision seemed inevitable.  After a seven-day trial in Kansas City federal court in March, in which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach needed to be tutored on basic trial procedure by the judge and was found in contempt for his “willful failure” to obey a ruling, even he knew his chances were slim.  Kobach told The Kansas City Star at the time that he expected the judge would rule against him (though he expressed optimism in his chances on appeal).

Sure enough, yesterday federal Judge Julie Robinson overturned the law that Kobach was defending as lead counsel for the state, dealing him an unalloyed defeat.  The statute, championed by Kobach and signed into law in 2013, required Kansans to present proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.  The American Civil Liberties Union sued, contending that the law violated the National Voter Registration Act (AKA the “motor voter” law), which was designed to make it easy to register.

The trial had a significance that extends far beyond the Jayhawk state.  One of the fundamental questions in the debate over alleged voter fraud — whether a substantial number of non-citizens are in fact registering to vote — was one of two issues to be determined in the Kansas proceedings.  (The second was whether there was a less burdensome solution than what Kansas had adopted.)  That made the trial a telling opportunity to remove the voter fraud claims from the charged, and largely proof-free, realms of political campaigns and cable news shoutfests and examine them under the exacting strictures of the rules of evidence.

That’s precisely what occurred and according to Robinson, an appointee of George W. Bush, the proof that voter fraud is widespread was utterly lacking.  As the judge put it, “the court finds no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote” even under the previous law, which Kobach had claimed was weak.

For Kobach, the trial should’ve been a moment of glory.  He’s been arguing for a decade that voter fraud is a national calamity.  Much of his career has been built on this issue, along with his fervent opposition to illegal immigration.  (His claim is that unlawful immigrants are precisely the ones voting illegally.)  Kobach, who also co-chaired the Trump administration’s short-lived Commission on Voter Fraud, is perhaps the individual most identified with the cause of sniffing out and eradicating phony voter registration.  He’s got a gilded resume, with degrees from Harvard University, Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, and is seen as both the intellect behind the cause and its prime advocate.  Kobach has written voter laws in other jurisdictions and defended them in court.  If anybody ever had time to marshal facts and arguments before a trial, it was Kobach.

But things didn’t go well for him in the Kansas City courtroom, as Robinson’s opinion made clear.  Kobach’s strongest evidence of non-citizen registration was anemic at best: Over a 20-year period, fewer than 40 non-citizens had attempted to register in one Kansas county that had 130,000 voters. [less than 0.03%]  Most of those 40 improper registrations were the result of mistakes or confusion rather than intentional attempts to mislead, and only five of the 40 managed to cast a vote.

One of Kobach’s own experts even rebutted arguments made by both Kobach and President Donald Trump.  The expert testified that a handful of improper registrations could not be extrapolated to conclude that 2.8 million fraudulent votes — roughly, the gap between Hillary Clinton and Trump in the popular vote tally — had been cast in the 2016 presidential election.  Testimony from a second key expert for Kobach also fizzled.

As the judge’s opinion noted, Kobach insisted the meager instances of cheating revealed at trial are just “the tip of the iceberg.”  As she explained, “This trial was his opportunity to produce credible evidence of that iceberg, but he failed to do so.”  Dismissing the testimony by Kobach’s witnesses as unpersuasive, Robinson drew what she called “the more obvious conclusion that there is no iceberg; only an icicle largely created by confusion and administrative error.”

By the time the trial was over, Kobach, a charismatic 52-year-old whose broad shoulders and imposing height make him resemble an aging quarterback, seemed to have shrunk inside his chair at the defense table.

But despite his defeat, Kobach’s causes — restricting immigration and tightening voting requirements — seem to be enjoying favorable tides elsewhere.  Recent press accounts noted Kobach’s role in restoring a question about citizenship, abandoned since 1950, to U.S. Census forms for 2020.  And the Supreme Court ruled on June 11 that the state of Ohio can purge voters from its rolls when they fail to vote even a single time and don’t return a mailing verifying their address, a provision that means more voters will need to re-register and prove their eligibility again.

For his own part, Kobach is now a candidate for governor of Kansas, running neck and neck with the incumbent in polls for the Republican primary on Aug. 7.  It’s not clear whether the verdict will affect his chances — or whether it will lead him and others to quietly retreat from claims of voter fraud.  But the judge’s opinion and expert interviews reveal that Kobach effectively put the concept of mass voter fraud to the test — and the evidence crumbled.

Perhaps it was an omen.  Before Kobach could enter the courtroom inside the Charles Evans Whittaker U.S. Courthouse each day, he had to pass through a hallway whose walls featured a celebratory display entitled “Americans by Choice: The Story of Immigration and Citizenship in Kansas.”  Photographs of people who’d been sworn in as citizens in that very courthouse were superimposed on the translucent window shades.

Public interest in the trial was high.  The seating area quickly filled to capacity on the first day of trial on the frigid morning of March 6.  The jury box was opened to spectators; it wouldn’t be needed, as this was a bench trial.  Those who couldn’t squeeze in were sent to a lower floor, where a live feed had been prepared in a spillover room.

From the moment the trial opened, Kobach and his co-counsels in the Kansas secretary of state’s office, Sue Becker and Garrett Roe, stumbled over the most basic trial procedures.  Their mistakes antagonized the judge.  “Evidence 101,” Robinson snapped, only minutes into the day, after Kobach’s team attempted to improperly introduce evidence.  “I’m not going to do it.”

Matters didn’t improve for Kobach from there.

Throughout the trial, his team’s repeated mishaps and botched cross examinations cost hours of the court’s time.  Robinson was repeatedly forced to step into the role of law professor, guiding Kobach, Becker and Roe through courtroom procedure.  “Do you know how to do the next step, if that’s what you’re going to do?” the judge asked Becker at one point, as she helped her through the steps of impeaching a witness.  “We’re going to follow the rules of evidence here.”

Becker often seemed nervous.  She took her bright red glasses off and on.  At times she burst into nervous chuckles after a misstep.  She laughed at witnesses, skirmished with the judge and even taunted the lawyers for the ACLU.  “I can’t wait to ask my questions on Monday!” she shouted at the end of the first week, jabbing a finger in the direction of Dale Ho, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.  Ho rolled his eyes.

Roe was gentler — deferential, even.  He often admitted he didn’t know what step came next, asking the judge for help.  “I don’t — I don’t know if this one is objectionable.  I hope it’s not,” he offered at one point, as he prepared to ask a question following a torrent of sustained objections.  “I’ll let you know,” an attorney for the plaintiffs responded, to a wave of giggles in the courtroom.  On the final day of trial, as Becker engaged in yet another dispute with the judge, Roe slapped a binder to his forehead and audibly whispered, “Stop talking.  Stop talking.”

Kobach’s cross examinations were smoother and better organized, but he regularly attempted to introduce exhibits — for example, updated state statistics that he had failed to provide the ACLU in advance to vet — that Robinson ruled were inadmissible.  As the trial wore on, she became increasingly irritated.  She implored Kobach to “please read” the rules on which she based her rulings, saying his team had repeated these errors “ad nauseum.”

Kobach seemed unruffled.  Instead of heeding her advice, he’d proffer the evidence for the record, a practice that allows the evidence to be preserved for appeal even if the trial judge refuses to admit it.  Over the course of the trial, Kobach and his team would do this nearly a dozen times.

Eventually, Robinson got fed up.  She asked Kobach to justify his use of proffers.  Kobach, seemingly alarmed, grabbed a copy of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — to which he had attached a growing number of Post-it notes — and quickly flipped through it, trying to find the relevant rule.

The judge tried to help.  “It’s Rule 26, of course, that’s been the basis for my rulings,” she told Kobach.  “I think it would be helpful if you would just articulate under what provision of Rule 26 you think this is permissible.”  Kobach seemed to play for time, asking clarifying questions rather than articulating a rationale.  Finally, the judge offered mercy: a 15-minute break.  Kobach’s team rushed from the courtroom.

It wasn’t enough to save him.  In her opinion, Robinson described “a pattern and practice by Defendant [Kobach] of flaunting disclosure and discovery rules.”  As she put it, “it is not clear to the Court whether Defendant repeatedly failed to meet his disclosure obligations intentionally or due to his unfamiliarity with the federal rules.”  She ordered Kobach to attend the equivalent of after-school tutoring: six hours of extra legal education on the rules of civil procedure or the rules of evidence (and to present the court with a certificate of completion).

It’s always a bad idea for a lawyer to try the patience of a judge — and that’s doubly true during a bench trial, when the judge will decide not only the law, but also the facts.  Kobach repeatedly annoyed Robinson with his procedural mistakes.  But that was nothing next to what the judge viewed as Kobach’s intentional bad faith.

This view emerged in writing right after the trial — that’s when Robinson issued her ruling finding Kobach in contempt — but before the verdict.  And the conduct that inspired the contempt finding had persisted over several years.  Robinson concluded that Kobach had intentionally failed to follow a ruling she issued in 2016 that ordered him to restore the privileges of 17,000 suspended Kansas voters.

In her contempt ruling, the judge cited Kobach’s “history of noncompliance” with the order and characterized his explanations for not abiding by it as “nonsensical” and “disingenuous.”  She wrote that she was “troubled” by Kobach’s “failure to take responsibility for violating this Court’s orders, and for failing to ensure compliance over an issue that he explicitly represented to the Court had been accomplished.”  Robinson ordered Kobach to pay the ACLU’s legal fees for the contempt proceeding.

That contempt ruling was actually the second time Kobach was singled out for punishment in the case.  Before the trial, a federal magistrate judge deputized to oversee the discovery portion of the suit fined him $1,000 for making “patently misleading representations” about a voting fraud document Kobach had prepared for Trump.  Kobach paid the fine with a state credit card.

More than any procedural bumbling, the collapse of Kobach’s case traced back to the disintegration of a single witness.

The witness was Jesse Richman, a political scientist from Old Dominion University, who has written studies on voter fraud.  For this trial, Richman was paid $5,000 by the taxpayers of Kansas to measure non-citizen registration in the state.  Richman was the man who had to deliver the goods for Kobach.

With his gray-flecked beard and mustache, Richman looked the part of an academic, albeit one who seemed a bit too tall for his suit and who showed his discomfort in a series of awkward, sudden movements on the witness stand.  At moments, Richman’s testimony turned combative, devolving into something resembling an episode of 'The Jerry Springer Show.'  By the time he left the stand, Richman had testified for more than five punishing hours.  He’d bickered with the ACLU’s lawyer, raised his voice as he defended his studies and repeatedly sparred with the judge.

“Wait, wait, wait!” shouted Robinson at one point, silencing a verbal free-for-all that had erupted among Richman, the ACLU’s Ho, and Kobach, who were all speaking at the same time.  “Especially you,” she said, turning her stare to Richman.  “You are not here to be an advocate.  You are not here to trash the plaintiff.  And you are not here to argue with me.”

Richman had played a small but significant part in the 2016 Presidential campaign.  Trump and others had cited his work to claim that illegal votes had robbed Trump of the popular vote.  At an October 2016 rally in Wisconsin, the candidate cited Richman’s work to bolster his predictions that the election would be rigged.  “You don’t read about this, right?”  Trump told the crowd, before reading from an op-ed Richman had written for The Washington Post: “‘We find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in various close elections.’ Okay?  All right?”

Richman’s 2014 study of non-citizen registration used data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — an online survey of more than 32,000 people.  Of those, fewer than 40 individuals indicated they were non-citizens registered to vote.  Based on that sample, Richman concluded that up to 2.8 million illegal votes had been cast in 2008 by non-citizens.  In fact, he put the illegal votes at somewhere between 38,000 and 2.8 million — a preposterously large range — and then Trump and others simply used the highest figure.

Academics pilloried Richman’s conclusions.  Two hundred political scientists signed an open letter criticizing the study, saying it should “not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting.”  Harvard’s Stephen Ansolabehere, who administered the CCES, published his own peer-reviewed paper lambasting Richman’s work.  Indeed, by the time Trump read Richman’s article onstage in 2016, The Washington Post had already appended a note to the op-ed linking to three rebuttals and a peer-reviewed study debunking the research.

None of that discouraged Kobach or Trump from repeating Richman’s conclusions.  They then went a few steps further.  They took the top end of the range for the 2008 election, assumed that it applied to the 2016 election, too, and further assumed that all of the fraudulent ballots had been cast for Clinton.

Some of those statements found their way into the courtroom, when Ho pressed play on a video shot by The Kansas City Star on Nov. 30, 2016.  Kobach had met with Trump 10 days earlier and had brought with him a paper decrying non-citizen registration and voter fraud.  Two days later, Trump tweeted that he would have won the popular vote if not for “millions of people who voted illegally.”

On the courtroom’s televisions, Kobach appeared, saying Trump’s tweet was “absolutely correct.”  Without naming Richman, Kobach referred to his study: The number of non-citizens who said they’d voted in 2008 was far larger than the popular vote margin, Kobach said on the video.  The same number likely voted again in 2016.

In the courtroom, Ho asked Richman if he believed his research supported such a claim.  Richman stammered.  He repeatedly looked at Kobach, seemingly searching for a way out.  Ho persisted and finally, Richman gave his answer: “I do not believe my study provides strong support for that notion.”

To estimate the number of non-citizens voting in Kansas, Richman had used the same methodology he employed in his much-criticized 2014 study.  Using samples as small as a single voter, he’d produced surveys with wildly different estimates of non-citizen registration in the state.  The multiple iterations confused everyone in the courtroom.

“For the record, how many different data sources have you provided?” Robinson interjected in the middle of one Richman answer.  “You provide a range of, like, zero to 18,000 or more.”

“I sense the frustration,” Richman responded, before offering a winding explanation of the multiple data sources and surveys he’d used to arrive at a half-dozen different estimates.  Robinson cut him off.  “Maybe we need to stop here,” she said.

“Your honor, let me finish answering your question,” he said.

“No, no.  I’m done,” she responded, as he continued to protest.  “No.  Dr. Richman, I’m done.”

To refute Richman’s numbers, the ACLU called on Harvard’s Ansolabehere, whose data Richman had relied on in the past.  Ansolabehere testified that Richman’s sample sizes were so small that it was just as possible that there were no non-citizens registered to vote in Kansas as 18,000.  “There’s just a great deal of uncertainty with these estimates,” he said.

Ho asked if it would be accurate to say that Richman’s data “shows a rate of non-citizen registration in Kansas that is not statistically distinct from zero?”

“Correct.”

The judge was harsher than Ansolabehere in her description of Richman’s testimony.  In her opinion, Robinson unloaded a fusillade of dismissive adjectives, calling Richman’s conclusions “confusing, inconsistent and methodologically flawed,” and adding that they were “credibly dismantled” by Ansolabehere.  She labeled elements of Richman’s testimony “disingenuous” and “misleading,” and stated that she gave his research “no weight” in her decision.

One of the paradoxes of Kobach is that he has become a star in circles that focus on illegal immigration and voting fraud despite poor results in the courtroom.  By ProPublica’s count, Kobach chalked up a 2–6 won-lost record in federal cases in which he was played a major role, and which reached a final disposition before the Kansas case.

Those results occurred when Kobach was an attorney for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform from 2004 to 2011, when he became secretary of state in Kansas.  In his FAIR role (in which he continued to moonlight till about 2014), Kobach traveled to places like Fremont, Nebraska, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Farmers Branch, Texas, and Valley Park, Missouri, to help local governments write laws that attempted to hamper illegal immigration, and then defend them in court.  Kobach won in Nebraska, but lost in Texas and Pennsylvania, and only a watered down version of the law remains in Missouri.

The best-known law that Kobach helped shape before joining the Kansas government in 2011 was Arizona’s “show me your papers” law.  That statute allowed police to demand citizenship documents for any reason from anyone they thought might be in the country illegally.  After it passed, the state paid Kobach $300 an hour to train law enforcement on how to legally arrest suspected illegal immigrants.  The Supreme Court gutted key provisions of the law in 2012.

Kobach also struggled in two forays into political campaigning.  In 2004, he lost a race for Congress.  He also drew criticism for his stint as an informal adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 Presidential campaign.  Kobach was the man responsible for Romney’s much-maligned proposal that illegal immigrants “self-deport,” one reason Romney attracted little support among Latinos.  Romney disavowed Kobach even before the campaign was over, telling media outlets that he was a “supporter,” not an adviser.

Trump’s election meant Kobach’s positions on immigration would be welcome in the White House.  Kobach lobbied for, but didn’t receive, an appointment as Secretary of Homeland Security.  He was, however, placed in charge of the Voter Fraud Commission, a pet project of Trump’s.  Facing a raft of lawsuits and bad publicity, the commission was disbanded little more than six months after it formally launched.

Back at home, Kobach expanded his power as secretary of state.  Boasting of his experience as a law professor and scholar, Kobach convinced the state legislature to give him the authority to prosecute election crimes himself, a power wielded by no other secretary of state.  In that role, he has obtained nine guilty pleas against individuals for election-related misdemeanors.  Only one of those who pleaded guilty, as it happens, was a non-citizen.

He also persuaded Kansas’ attorney general to allow Kobach to represent the state in the trial of Kansas’ voting law.  Kobach argued it was a bargain.  As he told The Wichita Eagle at the time, “The advantage is the state gets an experienced appellate litigator who is a specialist in this field and in constitutional law for the cost the state is already paying, which is my salary.”

Kobach fared no better in the second main area of the Kansas City trial than he had in the first.  This part explored whether there is a less burdensome way of identifying non-citizens than forcing everyone to show proof of citizenship upon registration.  Judge Robinson would conclude that there were many alternatives that were less intrusive.

In his opening, Ho of the ACLU spotlighted a potentially less intrusive approach.  Why not use the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements System list, and compare the names on it to the Kansas voter rolls?  That, Ho argued, could efficiently suss out illegal registrations.

Kobach told the judge that simply wasn’t feasible.  The list, he explained, doesn’t contain all non-citizens in the country illegally — it contains only non-citizens legally present and those here illegally who register in some way with the federal government.  Plus, he told Robinson, in order to really match the SAVE list against a voter roll, both datasets would have to contain alien registration numbers, the identifier given to non-citizens living in the U.S.  “Those are things that a voter registration system doesn’t have,” he said.  “So, the SAVE system does not work.”

But Kobach had made the opposite argument when he headed the Voter Fraud Commission.  There, he’d repeatedly advocated the use of the SAVE database.  Appearing on Fox News in May 2017, shortly after the commission was established, Kobach said, “The Department of Homeland Security knows of the millions of aliens who are in the United States legally and that data that’s never been bounced against the state’s voter rolls to see whether these people are registered.”  He said the federal databases “can be very valuable.”

A month later, as chief of the Voting Fraud Commission, Kobach took steps to compare state information to the SAVE database.  He sent a letter to all 50 secretaries of state requesting their voter rolls.  Bipartisan outrage ensued.  Democrats feared he would use the rolls to encourage states to purge legitimately registered voters.  Republicans labelled the request federal overreach.

At trial, Kobach’s main expert on this point was Hans von Spakovsky, another member of the Voter Fraud Commission.  He, too, had been eager in commission meetings to match state voter rolls to the SAVE database.

But like Kobach, von Spakovsky took a different tack at trial.  He testified that this database was unusable by elections offices.  “In your experience and expertise as an election administrator and one who studies elections,” Kobach asked, “is [the alien registration number] a practical or even possible thing for a state to do in its voter registration database?”  Von Spakovsky answered, “No, it is not.”

Von Spakovsky and Kobach have been friends for more than a decade.  They worked together at the Department of Justice under George W. Bush.  Kobach focused on immigration issues — helping create a database to register visitors to the U.S. from countries associated with terrorism — while von Spakovsky specialized in voting issues; he had opposed the renewal of the Voting Rights Act.

Von Spakovsky’s history as a local elections administrator in Fairfax County, Va., qualified him as an expert on voting fraud.  Between 2010 and 2012, while serving as vice chairman of the county’s three-member electoral board, he’d examined the voter rolls and found what he said were 300 registered non-citizens.  He’d pressed for action against them, but none came.  Von Spakovsky later joined the Heritage Foundation, where he remains today, generating research that underpins the arguments of those who claim mass voter fraud.

Like Richman, von Spakovsky seemed nervous on the stand, albeit not combative.  He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a severe, immovable expression.  Immigration is a not-so-distant feature of his family history: His parents — Russian and German immigrants — met in a refugee camp in American-occupied Germany after World War II before moving to the U.S.

Von Spakovsky had the task of testifying about what was intended to be a key piece of evidence for Kobach’s case: a spreadsheet of 38 non-citizens who had registered to vote, or attempted to register, in a 20-year period in Sedgwick County, Kansas.

But the 38 non-citizens turned out to be something less than an electoral crime wave.  For starters, some of the 38 had informed Sedgwick County that they were non-citizens.  One woman had sent her registration postcard back to the county with an explanation that it was a “mistake” and that she was not a citizen.  Another listed an alien registration number — which tellingly begins with an “A” — instead of a Social Security number on the voter registration form.  The county registered her anyway.

When von Spakovsky took the stand, he had to contend with questions that suggested he had cherry-picked his data.  (The judge would find he had.)  In his expert report, von Spakovsky had referenced a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office that polled federal courts to see how many non-citizens had been excused from jury duty for being non-citizens — a sign of fraud, because jurors are selected from voter rolls.  The GAO report mentioned eight courts.  Only one said it had a meaningful number of jury candidates who claimed to be non-citizens: “between 1 and 3 percent” had been dismissed on these grounds.  This was the only court von Spakovsky mentioned in his expert report.

His report also cited a 2012 TV news segment from an NBC station in Fort Myers, Fla.  Reporters claimed to have discovered more than 100 non-citizens on the local voter roll.

“Now, you know, Mr.  von Spakovsky, don’t you, that after this NBC report there was a follow-up by the same NBC station that determined that at least 35 of those 100 individuals had documentation to prove they were, in fact, United States citizens.  Correct?” Ho asked.  “I am aware of that now, yes,” von Spakovsky replied.

That correction had been online since 2012 and Ho had asked von Spakovsky the same question almost two years before in a deposition before the trial.  But von Spakovsky never corrected his expert report.

Under Ho’s questioning, von Spakovsky also acknowledged a false assertion he made in 2011.  In a nationally syndicated column for McClatchy, von Spakovsky claimed a tight race in Missouri had been decided by the illegal votes of 50 Somali nationals.  A month before the column was published, a Missouri state judge ruled that no such thing had happened.

On the stand, von Spakovsky claimed he had no knowledge of the ruling when he published the piece.  He conceded that he never retracted the assertion.

Kobach, who watched the exchange without objection, had repeatedly made the same claim — even after the judge ruled it was false.  In 2011, Kobach wrote a series of columns using the example as proof of the need for voter ID, publishing them in outlets ranging from the Topeka Capital-Journal to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.  In 2012, he made the claim in an article published in the Syracuse Law Review.  In 2013, he wrote an op-ed for the Kansas City Star with the same example: “The election was stolen when Rizzo received about 50 votes illegally cast by citizens of Somalia.”  None of those articles have ever been corrected.

Ultimately, Robinson would lacerate von Spakovsky’s testimony, much as she had Richman’s.  Von Spakovsky’s statements, the judge wrote, were “premised on several misleading and unsupported examples” and included “false assertions.”  As she put it, “His generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence, and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws.”

There was one other wobbly leg holding up the argument that voter fraud is rampant: the very meaning of the word “fraud.”

Kobach’s case, and the broader claim, rely on an extremely generous definition.  Legal definitions of fraud require a person to knowingly be deceptive.  But both Kobach and von Spakovsky characterized illegal ballots as “fraud” regardless of the intention of the voter.

Indeed, the nine convictions Kobach has obtained in Kansas are almost entirely made up of individuals who didn’t realize they were doing something wrong.  For example, there were older voters who didn’t understand the restrictions and voted in multiple places they owned property.  There was also a college student who’d forgotten she’d filled out an absentee ballot in her home state before voting months later in Kansas.  (She voted for Trump both times.)

Late in the trial, the ACLU presented Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers who has written extensively about voter fraud, as a rebuttal witness.  Her book, “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” concluded that almost all instances of illegal votes can be chalked up to misunderstandings and administrative error.

Kobach sent his co-counsel, Garrett Roe, to cross-examine her.  “It’s your view that what matters is the voter’s knowledge that his or her action is unlawful?” Roe asked.  “In a definition of fraud, yes,” said Minnite.  Roe pressed her about this for several questions, seemingly surprised that she wouldn’t refer to all illegal voting as fraud.

Minnite stopped him.  “The word ‘fraud’ has meaning, and that meaning is that there’s intent behind it.  And that’s actually what Kansas laws are with respect to illegal voting,” she said.  “You keep saying my definition” she said, putting finger quotes around “my.”  “But, you know, it’s not like it’s a freak definition.”

Kobach had explored a similar line of inquiry with von Spakovsky, asking him if the list of 38 non-citizens he’d reviewed could be absolved of “fraud” because they may have lacked intent.

“No,” von Spakovsky replied, “I think any time a non-citizen registers, any time a non-citizen votes, they are — whether intentionally or by accident, I mean — they are defrauding legitimate citizens from a fair election.”

After Kobach concluded his questions, the judge began her own examination of von Spakovsky.

“I think it’s fair to say there’s a pretty good distinction in terms of how the two of you define fraud,” the judge said, explaining that Minnite focused on intent, while she understood von Spakovsky’s definition to include any time someone who wasn’t supposed to vote did so, regardless of reason.  “Would that be a fair characterization?” she asked.

“Yes ma’am,” von Spakovsky replied.

The judge asked whether a greater number of legitimate voters would be barred from casting ballots under the law than fraudulent votes prevented.  In that scenario, she asked, “Would that not also be defrauding the electoral process?”  Von Spakovsky danced around the answer, asserting that one would need to answer that question in the context of the registration requirements, which he deemed reasonable.

The judge cut him off.  “Well that doesn’t really answer my question,” she said, saying that she found it contradictory that he wanted to consider context when examining the burden of registration requirements, but not when examining the circumstances in which fraud was committed.

“When you’re talking about … non-citizen voting, you don’t want to consider that in context of whether that person made a mistake, whether a DMV person convinced them they should vote,” she said.  Von Spakovsky allowed that not every improper voter should be prosecuted, but insisted that “each ballot they cast takes away the vote of and dilutes the vote of actual citizens who are voting.  And that’s —”

The judge interrupted again.  “So, the thousands of actual citizens that should be able to vote but who are not because of the system, because of this law, that’s not diluting the vote and that’s not impairing the integrity of the electoral process, I take it?” she said.

Von Spakovsky didn’t engage with the hypothetical.  He simply didn’t believe it was happening.  “I don’t believe that this requirement prevents individuals who are eligible to register and vote from doing so.”  Later, on the stand, he’d tell Ho he couldn’t think of a single law in the country that he felt negatively impacted anyone’s ability to register or vote.

Robinson, in the end, strongly disagreed.  As she wrote in her opinion, “the Court finds that the burden imposed on Kansans by this law outweighs the state’s interest in preventing noncitizen voter fraud, keeping accurate voter rolls, and maintaining confidence in elections.  The burden is not just on a ‘few voters,’ but on tens of thousands of voters, many of whom were disenfranchised” by Kobach’s law.  The law, she concluded, was a bigger problem than the one it set out to solve, acting as a “deterrent to registration and voting for substantially more eligible Kansans than it has prevented ineligible voters from registering to vote.”

TRUMP AGENDA - Voter Suppression via Census

"Citizenship question may result in less accurate 2020 census, says former bureau director" PBS NewsHour 3/27/2018

REMINDER:  The 'citizenship' question was pulled from the census in 1950.

"Decennial U.S. Census figures are based on actual counts of persons dwelling in U.S. residential structures.  They include citizens, non-citizen legal residents, non-citizen long-term visitors, and illegal immigrants." - Wikipedia

Also, when responding don't answer the question.

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The U.S. Department of Commerce announced Monday it plans to add back a question on citizenship status to the 2020 census -- a change requested by the Justice Department.  Now the state of California is suing the Trump administration, calling the move unconstitutional.  The former director of the U.S. Census Bureau Kenneth Pruitt discusses the impact of the rule change with Judy Woodruff.

AMERICAN POLITICS - 2020 False Census

IMHO:  The purpose of the census is ONLY to count how many people live in the United States of America, citizen OR non-citizen.

"Wilbur Ross Overruled Career Officials at Census Bureau to Add Citizenship Question" by Justin Elliott, ProPublica 3/27/2018

The Commerce secretary wrote a memo arguing that the benefits of the controversial question would outweigh any harm.

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross’ decision Monday to add a controversial question on citizenship to the 2020 census came in the face of opposition from career officials at the Census Bureau who fear it will depress response rates, especially from immigrants.

Two people with knowledge of the deliberations said career leaders in the Census Bureau, which is part of the Commerce Department, had scrambled to come up with alternatives to adding the question.  Those efforts were unsuccessful.

In a memo announcing his decision, Ross said that “The Census Bureau and many stakeholders expressed concern that [a citizenship question] would negatively impact the response rate for non-citizens.”

But Ross added that “neither the Census Bureau nor the concerned stakeholders could document that the response rate would in fact decline materially.”

The Census Bureau recently noted greater fear and reluctance to fill out the survey in the current political climate.  In a November presentation, a bureau official cited a recent increase in respondents expressing concerns about confidentiality of data related to immigration.  It cited particular concerns among participants in what it labeled an Arabic focus group and among Spanish-speaking respondents.

A Census spokesman referred questions to the Commerce Department.  A Commerce spokesman said that Ross “took a hard look” at an alternative proposal by the Census Bureau to get citizenship data without adding the question.  But he ultimately decided the proposed method “would provide an incomplete picture."  The Ross memo argues that the value of the data collected from the new question will outweigh any harm.

ProPublica first reported in December that the Justice Department had submitted a last-minute request that the Census Bureau add a question on citizenship to the 2020 survey.  The Justice Department argued that better data on citizens was needed to better enforce voting rights protections for minority groups.  But civil rights groups and Democrats fear that the question will lower response rates, affecting congressional redistricting and distribution of federal dollars for a decade.

It would be the first time since 1950 that the full, once-a-decade census asks people about their citizenship.  The Constitution requires a count of all residents of the country every ten years.  The Census Bureau conducts a separate detailed survey of a sample of U.S. households that includes questions about citizenship.

The driving force behind the request for the new question, according to internal emails, was a Justice Department political appointee who spent years as an attorney in private practice defending GOP redistricting maps around the country.  That raised even more concerns among civil rights groups that opposed the addition of a citizenship question.

In response to Ross’ decision, the state of California filed a federal lawsuit Monday night in U.S. district court seeking to block the question.  “California simply has too much to lose for us to allow the Trump Administration to botch this important decennial obligation,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement.  “What the Trump Administration is requesting is not just alarming, it is an unconstitutional attempt to discourage an accurate census count.”

Update, March 28, 2018: This story has been updated to include a comment from the Commerce Department.