Story the First
Popular vote loser Donald J. Trump is determined to prove millions and millions of illegals voted for Hillary Clinton — (But the whole Russia thing is “Fake News”) — which is why he chose noted voting suppression expert Kris Kobach to sit on the special commission that will prove Donald J. Trump is NOT A LOSER.
Charles P. Pierce weighs in at Esquire:
...But the single most malevolent ethical dwarf in this incredible array of boobs and vandals may be Kris Kobach, the godfather of the national movement to suppress the votes of people the GOP would prefer not to exercise the franchise, and author of some of the most extreme anti-immigration strategies since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In Kobach's mind, of course, these go hand-in-hand in the fight against "voter fraud," which also exists largely between Kobach's ears.
Kobach has asked every state to give him voter rolls. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones spells out how Kobach works it:
The progressive community is up in arms about this, as it should be, and several states have already told Kobach to pound sand. But this isn’t really a direct attempt to suppress black or Hispanic votes. Atrios is right about its purpose:
Kobach knows this game with databases. You program them to make soft matches — similar names, party affiliation — and then accuse everyone of having a match of having voted twice. Of course this almost never ever ever ever happens and certainly doesn’t happen enough to swing elections, but gotta lock up potential Dem voters any way you can.
Kobach doesn’t have the resources or the remit to pursue any fraud cases. What he wants to do is come up with a number for people registered twice. Or dead people who are registered. Or people registered at two different addresses. He will then claim that all of them are examples of fraud and announce that 23.7 percent of all registration is fraudulent. We’ve already seen this movie, and the sequel is bound to be the same.
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Josh Marshall over at Talking Point Memo sums it up:
...What most people don’t clearly remember is that the US Attorneys [2006-2007 firing] scandal was really a voter suppression scandal…
...What we have now with President Trump’s ‘Election Integrity’ Commission is a much more thorough-going, ambitious and open effort to do the same thing. It’s like an AUMF targeting non-white voters and secondarily anyone who votes for Democrats with any regularity. The people getting top positions on the Commission are basically the worst of the worst from the 2006/07 days. It’s really that bad. And they’re already trying to pull together all the confidential voter data from every state in the union.
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Nancy Le Tourneau at Washington Monthly reports that Kobach won’t have to do all the heavy lifting by himself.
...Less noticed was the fact that Trump appointed an additional member to the commission—Hans von Spakovsky. You may not have heard that name before. But back in 2006/07, he was in the news as the guy Dubya nominated for a position on the Federal Election Commission. Based on his record at the Justice Department, civil rights groups and Democrats fought against his confirmation and he finally withdrew, taking a position with the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative.
...In many ways, von Spakovsky is to African American voter suppression what Kobach is to immigrant voter suppression. Prior to spending most of his adult life in Georgia, Mayer notes that his parents (German mother and Russian father) had settled in Alabama. She provides this interesting tell about his early years.
Although the civil-rights movement created tumult in Alabama during his childhood, he says that he has no memory of it.
To grow up in Alabama and be oblivious of the civil rights movement is hard to imagine. But if it’s true that he has no memory of it, that means that he was safely ensconced in a world of white supremacy.
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The response from Mississippi to Kobach’s request is… unambiguous.
Story the Second
Put your drink down before reading this next bit.
Ready?
Sam Thielman at Talking Points Memo explains why there is no evidence any voting machines were hacked:
DHS officials from former secretary Jeh Johnson to acting Director of Cyber Division Samuel Liles may be adamant that machines were not affected, but the agency has not in fact opened up a single voting machine since November to check.
Think about that for a moment, then read on.
...Computer scientists have been critical of that decision. “They have performed computer forensics on no election equipment whatsoever,” said J. Alex Halderman, who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about the vulnerability of election systems. “That would be one of the most direct ways of establishing in the equipment whether it’s been penetrated by attackers. We have not taken every step we could.”
Voting machines, especially the electronic machines still used in several states, are so insecure that an attack on them is likely to be successful, according to a report from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice out Thursday morning. David Dill, a voting systems expert and professor of computer science at Stanford University quoted in the report, said hackers can easily breach election systems regardless of whether they’re able to coordinate widely enough to alter a general election result.
“I don’t know why they wouldn’t try to hack voting machines and I don’t know what would stop them,” Dill told TPM. “Any statement that says ‘We haven’t see evidence of X’ also means ‘We haven’t lifted a finger to investigate.’”
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What Digby Said about Kobach also applies here, to the Trump administration:
Meanwhile, if a foreign government wants to play in our elections be their guest. This is their priority.
The only way they'd ever crack down on cyber-interference would be if Mexico did it.
Digby’s reaction to the TPM story about non-audits of voting machines is here.
Meanwhile, Josh Marshall at TPM has also been parsing the Wall Street Journal article laying out possible GOP collusion with Russia. The attitude on display there might also explain why the GOP seems largely uninterested in the possibility that voting machines might have been hacked by Russia.
...Shane Harris, the reporter on the new story, also contributed reporting to that story about Aaron Nevins. (There are reasons which I’ll discuss in a subsequent post why Nevins quite likely already stipulated to a criminal act in his interview with the Journal.) When I read this article a month ago, I was struck by the concluding two grafs …
He isn’t convinced the Russians were behind it, Mr. Nevins said, but even if they were, it doesn’t matter to him because the agenda of the hackers seemed to match his own.
“If your interests align,” he said, “never shut any doors in politics.”
This seems to have been a widespread belief among the more adventurous run of GOP political operatives last year: if your interests align with Russian intelligence operatives, it’s not a problem.
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Nothing to see here. Move along.