Since Trump started talking (I guess I have to say “lying”) about the 3-5 million votes by illegals last weekend, I’ve been saying that we should be demanding he investigate them. A “put up or shut up” challenge. I cheered when members of the media pressed the White House spokesman on what evidence that the Tangerine Tyrant had for his claim and asking why they weren’t investigating such a massive criminal fraud.
So, today, he says he’ll do it — and I’m seeing great, very smart progressives reacting with profound concern. I don’t deny that there’s room or reason for concern. It could open the door for drastic changes to restrict voting in ways that would boost Republicans and cement the dictatorship. It’s possible we’ve been played, and the Dear Leader will use this investigation to end effective democracy. It will require great vigilance and close examination of what this investigation does and what it comes up with.
But, there’s also a reason why Republicans have been hoping for him to shut up about it. They don’t want this investigation because they’ve been relying on hearsay and bullshit to justify their current voter ID laws. I’m hopeful this investigation will actually undercut their claims.
I’ve been doing voter protection for 15 years. I know there are some problems. And, frankly, the federal government should be involved in elections in a much bigger way, instituting best practices nationally. Republicans don’t want to open that door.
Right now, voter purges are happening. They don’t need a new study or investigation for that. In fact, I think we need to get federal control over this — to look at building a national voter database that can be used to identify which voters have died or moved out of state. We could have automatic registration for citizens wherever they live — and there could be some identifying information — perhaps even a photo — embedded in the rolls. With this in place, no one would have to present a photo ID at the polls. We could undercut any rationale for ID laws.
The government would be enlisted in to getting people registered and securing their registration in ways that would provide the needed confidence that no voter impersonation is happening. This would have to be done in a way with enough secure backups that hacking the sytem would be fruitless.
If it turns out that there are some things that the GOP is able to find evidence of and wants to institute reasonable rules to prevent, we can agree to them, in exchange for a best practices standard for deploying voting machines — so that minority districts aren’t disadvantaged with fewer or older, broken down machines.
The voter rolls should also be reformed in many ways.
1) ...To protect party registrations. A lot of people lost their party registrations. Many of them claim they were switched despite having done nothing to precipitate that. That may have happened -— but what we observed in Maryland is that this was largely a problem for people who had filed a change of address, probably without indicating their party preference (they wouldn’t becuase their intention was not to change that). One Bernie delegate here claimed that she got a notice of her party change after she requested an absentee ballot. That might be another point where this process goes wrong.
2) ...To ensure better communication between agencies given this task. On Election Day in Virginia (where I was in the hotline boiler room) we found a lot of people who had to vote provisionally because the DMV had taken their registrations but somehow their names didn’t get added to the rolls. This may be because the agencies like the DMV are working with different forms and different software than the Boards of Elections. This causes great delays at the Board in processing these applications.
If a secure connection could be set up to the national database, there would also be no reason to oppose same-day registrations for one and all, but especially for those who have moved and want to vote in their new home precinct.
3) Purges would not happen. The rolls would be managed in a way that was controlled to ensure mistakes do not happen. Updating would be an automatic process, determined by life events and actions by the voter, not by some party bureacrat. Any changes that get this out of the hands of party pople would be a good one. We must demand that any federal role here be 100% non-partisan.
4) I’ll leave this here for people to add their own impressions…
There are a lot of things I would do to reform our elections, and this could be a starting point. As long as Democrats can look at the data and can respond, we can use this as a lever to make smart reforms which will lead to much better elections.
Here’s a document that was created by a task force in my home county, with over 50 recommendations (including instant runoffs).
If we can eliminate the argument that millions of illegals in California are voting to change the popular vote, we will weaken the arguments in opposition to Electoral College reform, too.
While I avve some concern that I — we’ve been played, I think this could be a real gift to Democrats who’ve been waging the war against voter suppression.