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writing for godot

The Republicans' Mad Experiments With Vote Rigging

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Written by David Starr   
Thursday, 06 September 2018 04:07

The mad experiments with vote rigging the Republicans have imposed are harsh in various states. Since January 2010, 23 states have imposed restrictions on the right to vote. ID laws, minimizing early voting, adding new obstacles for voter registration, purging voter rolls and denying ex-felons the right to vote have given the Republicans an unfair advantage. Ari Berman, writing in Rolling Stone, cited an MIT study: In the 2016 presidential election, more than one million votes were lost through not having the right ID, long lines at the polls and not being able to register. About 16 million people experienced at least one problem voting.

After Trump became president (and using the blatant lie that "millions voted illegally"), the Commission on Election Integrity was created. One of those running the Commission was Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who proceeded to spread lies about voter fraud, and in turn restricting the access to vote. Berman wrote that the Commission didn't last long because of 15 federal and state lawsuits which accused the Commission of violating privacy and transparency laws.

With the Citizens United decision in January 2010, wealthy donors and corporations have contributed large sums of money, often in secret (thus the term, "dark money"). Citizens United gave the wealthy the power to buy elections. Three billion in outside money has been spent since the decision. And Republicans have been encouraged to play dirty.

Two of the methods the Republicans have used are voter caging and Crosscheck:

Voter caging - The sending of mail to people who are on voter rolls. Mail that is undeliverable is compiled in a list. Those on the list are purged from voter rolls or their registration is challenged.

Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program (IVRC) - For short, Crosscheck, which is a data base system that compares voter records from other states to see if someone with the same name voted twice. The identification of individuals is determined by first and last name and social security number. Two or more people with the same name happens often. But the Republicans ignore this and count two or more people as one. Another consideration is differentiating two or more people with their middle names. But have the Republicans ignored this too?

Reporting investigator Greg Palast has dug deep in finding out how elections have been stolen; along with who is doing it. He looked at the 2016 presidential election, which occurred after conservatives on the Supreme Court made the Voting Rights Act toothless. Palast takes into consideration three states affected by Crosscheck:

Trump's margin of victory in -

Michigan - 13,107. Crosscheck purge list - 449,922

Arizona - 85,287. Crosscheck purge list - 270,824

North Carolina - 177,008. Crosscheck purge - 589, 393

Palast added that Michigan as an example had a purge list of about 450,000 voters. He figured that 12 percent is the "absolute minimum number of removals" from the list. That could mean that about 50,000 voters were removed from the rolls. (Palast is referring to an absolute minimum, so it was probably higher.) Fifty thousand removals obviously isn't as high as 450,000. But still, it is a high number.

Then there is Florida, a blatant example of rigging the vote. Palast: "In 2000, in Florida, Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as spoiled because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses. Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore."

But the Republicans' voter suppression has been especially harsh in Wisconsin where the Republican-dominated state legislature redrew (gerrymandered) the legislative maps. Berman wrote that in an exercise of strict secrecy, legislators had to sign confidentiality "agreements." They were not allowed to say anything to anyone regarding the redrawing of maps. Berman quoted a part of the "agreement": '"Public comments on this map may be different than what you hear in this room. Ignore the public comments."'

The harshest voting restrictions came about when governor Scott Walker and the GOP took power. The "laws" passed have made it harder for Democratic-leaning constituencies to vote. Berman wrote that the Republicans' gerrymandering in Wisconsin is one of the most extreme examples in U.S. history. And Wisconsin was the first state to require government-issued photo IDs.

Walker and his fellow Republicans received tremendous contributions from billionaire donors to finance their campaigns. Berman quoted Lisa Graves, a senior fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy, saying that Wisconsin is "the Wild West of dark money."

Purging, whether it be Crosscheck, caging or another method, affected communities of color (especially), the working class and the poor. Palast asserted that Kris Kobach and other operatives removed 1.1 million voters of color in GOP-dominated states from the voter rolls since 2013. In North Carolina, 6,700 blacks lost their registrations in 2016 because they were challenged by an outfit called the Voter Integrity Project (VIP). Fortunately, a lawsuit resulted in putting those purged back on the voter rolls.

What about Democrats? Do they steal elections? Palast said, "Now I don't want to say both parties..for those saying, well, that means Democrats are stealing it, well basically the...advantage that Democrats have is they simply let people vote. Now you could say that they're allowing people to vote a second time from another state, or aliens, etc. but we haven't seen – you know, again, where are the arrest for these crimes?" In other words, voter fraud very seldom occurs. Besides, the Republicans, compared to the Democrats, have been pros at stealing the vote.

Wherever it may be in the United States, the Republicans' mad experiments with vote rigging are cause to take out as many lawsuits as possible against them. And there has to be an amendment to overturn Citizens United. The chicanery, secrecy and buying of elections must stop.

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