Trump's Commission Produced No Evidence of Voter Fraud

Trump and Kobach sought to manufacture support for Trump's lies. 

His fragile and narcissistic ego apparently unable to cope with the reality that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election, Trump claimed that as many as three to five million fraudulent votes had been cast in the 2016 election.  Lacking any proof for the claim - which was eagerly embraced by his knuckle dragging, racist and white Christian nationalist supporters - Trump established a commission to investigate whether voter fraud had occurred. Vice Chair of this group was Kris Kobach who has a ugly record of voter suppression and untruths in his home state.  Ultimately, faced with multiple law suits, the commission was disbanded.  As for voter fraud and/or voting by illegal aliens, the commission produced no evidence whatsoever. The commission's entire purpose in retrospect was to manufacture  support for Trump's lie.  A piece in the Washington Post reports on the commissions true agenda and failure to produce any evidence of fraudulent voting.  Nonetheless, mindless and/or racist Trump supporters continue to repeat the meme and some, like one local "friend" continue to re-post utterly false information.  My view on this individual and those like them: be honest about your bigotry and join a white supremacist group.  Here are article highlights: 

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.

Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state — after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work, which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel.

Before it was disbanded by Trump in January, the panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the White House claimed at the time that it had shut down the commission despite “substantial evidence of voter fraud,” due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states.

Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, . . .

Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that three to five million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.”

Dunlap said that his time on the panel was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of.” “We had more transparency on a deer task force than I had on a presidential commission,” he said. “We had probably a dozen meetings. They were all public. We published everything we did in the newspaper and published results, including information we got from the public.” In contrast, the voter-integrity panel was marked by obfuscation, secrecy and confusion related to the work the panel was engaged in.

He received the documents he sought only in July, after a federal judge ordered the administration to turn them over, despite the objections of the Justice Department.

The materials provide a window into the panel’s operations. In one email, Christy McCormick, a Republican member of the commission, spoke to a staff member about recruiting a career statistician from the Department of Justice to the commission, writing that she was “pretty confident that he is conservative (and Christian, too).”

Trump’s claim that as many as three to five million fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election remains one of his most notable falsehoods.

No credible evidence has ever been produced, by the White House or anyone else, to substantiate the claim. 

That lawsuit is not yet resolved. Dunlap says he believes that the committee may yet have more information to procure, while the government has said it wants to terminate the litigation, said Clark Pettig, a spokesman for American Oversight.

Meanwhile, despite the truth, I expect my "friend" to continue pushing the Trump inspired lie that voter fraud is rampant. What truly amazes/sickens me is the failure of such people to see the common humanity of others.  Sadly, seemingly, all they see is black or brown skin and the other is transformed into something less than fully human.  Yet many of them park themselves in church pews every Sunday even as they make Christianity an exercise in rank hypocrisy. No wonder the younger generations are leaving religion in droves. 

Has Trump Triggered A New Accidental Renaissance?

The reality is that Donald Trump received 46% of the votes of those who went out and voted on November 8, 2016.  Those voters represented 57.9% of eligible voters.  Do the math and the result is that Trump received votes from only 26.5% of the total electorate.  This is not a mandate and it surely does not equate to the earth moving as claimed by Der Trumpenführer and easily explains the low crowd turnout for the 2017 inauguration - an event that Trump likely viewed as his coronation.  The bottom line is that Trump is a minority backed president and that wittingly or not, he may be the catalyst needed to energize a great political renaissance where citizens once again realize that political engagement is a must and that complacency leads to horrific results.  A column in the New York Times looks at what might be the one bright spot in Trump's foul presidency.  Here are excerpts:

My friend Sam laughed when I told him I was going to spend my Saturday at a “Search for Meaning” festival at a Jesuit college in the heart of seriously secular Seattle. . . . all the keynote events at Seattle University were completely sold out. In the winter of the American soul, people thronged to hear advice on how to “live a life of significance and impact” and to “find meaning in times of change, challenge and chaos.”

I credit President Trump. Not because he seems any more evolved than the first earthworms now appearing in the cold soil of my garden. . . .  because the threats to truth, civility, rational thought and brotherly love coming from the White House have prompted a huge counterreaction.

It’s early, but we may be experiencing a great awakening for the humane values that are under siege by a dark-side presidency. People are going inward, to find something bigger than Trump, and outward, to limit the damage he inflicts on the country.

Trump has been good — indirectly — for a free press, an independent judiciary, high school civics, grass-roots political activity, cautionary tales in literature and theater, and spirituality. You don’t know what you’ve got, as the song says, till it’s gone — or nearly so.

Face it: We have become a lazy, aging, fairly ignorant democracy. Even in the most turbulent election in modern history, about 90 million eligible voters didn’t bother to cast a ballot — the basic task of citizenship. Trump took his 46 percent of those who did vote, many of whom believe fake-moon-landing-level lies, and has tried to act like the earth moved, as he said on Tuesday. It did, but not in the ways that he meant it.

It would be immodest, even overtly Trumpian, to boast about the huge circulation gains at the not-failing New York Times, or the robust support for our competitors, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. But let’s just say having a man who told an average of four false or misleading statements a day for the first month of his presidency has been good for those the president calls enemies of the people.

The hottest book of the Trump era, George Orwell’s “1984,” is headed for Broadway. “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” Orwell wrote, with chilling prescience. Also sailing out of bookstores: Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here,” Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and my personal favorite, Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.”

Trump fright has produced a deep dive into history. Millions now know that “enemy of the people” was a Soviet-era threat used by Stalinist thugs. And “America First,” Trump’s governing theme, was a slogan of Nazi sympathizers in the United States just before World War II.

Which brings us to civics. One of the great failures of late has been the diminishment of this vital owner’s manual for citizenship. Only 23 percent of eighth graders scored at or above proficiency in civics in a survey last year. Almost two-thirds of adults cannot name all three branches of government.

But now students are clamoring to talk about government and politics. The kids are demanding that their teachers do something to prevent another generation of politically illiterate citizens from coming of age. They are also marching in the street, along with their parents, who have already pulled off one of the largest political demonstrations in American history.

In stepping on American values, Trump has prompted people to find out more about those values, and ultimately to defend them. The high to his low is an unexpected renaissance.

The New Gilded Age: Middle Class Shrinks Further

The GOP policies of aiding the wealthy, blocking funding for infrastructure repairs, and the destruction of labor unions continue to bear fruit and the American middle class continues to shrink.  It's all in keeping with the GOP's apparent desire to bring back the worse aspects of the Gilded Age when the wealthy lived like aristocrats and the rest of us were the peasants and serfs.  The shortsightedness, of course, is that as the middle class shrinks, the purchasing power that drives the overall economy shrinks.  Not that Republicans seem to care given all of the political bribes contributions they receive from wealthy and vulture capitalists.  The New York Times looks at the alarming trend.  Here are highlights:

The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.

Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.

But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom.

The definition here starts at $35,000 — which is about 50 percent higher than the official poverty level for a family of four — and ends at the six-figure mark. Although many Americans in households making more than $100,000 consider themselves middle class, particularly those living in expensive regions like the Northeast and Pacific Coast, they have substantially more money than most people.

However the lines are drawn, it is clear that millions are struggling to hang on to accouterments that most experts consider essential to a middle-class life.

“I would consider middle class to be people who can live comfortably on what they earn, can pay their bills, can set aside something to save for retirement and for kids in college and can have vacations and entertainment,” said Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project . . .

Even as the American middle class has shrunk, it has gone through a transformation. The 53 million households that remain in the middle class — about 43 percent of all households — look considerably different from their middle-class predecessors of a previous generation, according to a New York Times analysis of census data.

In recent years, the fastest-growing component of the new middle class has been households headed by people 65 and older. Today’s seniors have better retirement benefits than previous generations. Also, older Americans are increasingly working past traditional retirement age. More than eight million, or 19 percent, were in the labor force in 2013, nearly twice as many as in 2000.

The growing prominence of older people in the middle class reflects, in part, the way Social Security and Medicare — originally set up as safety nets to protect seniors from falling into poverty after retirement — have provided a substantial cushion for them against hard times.

Married couples with children — who make up a category that is shrinking over all — are diminishing even faster as a share of the middle class. In the late 1960s, about 45 percent of all households included married adults and their offspring. But among middle-class households, more than 60 percent had that traditional family arrangement.

Today, married couples with children at home make up just a quarter of households.

The most recent recession put a halt to the advances of even that generally successful group. Its share in the middle class has fallen by three percentage points and the share earning less than $35,000 has increased.

“In the Great Recession, we lost a lot of middle-income jobs and we gained a lot of low-paying jobs,” said Michael R. Strain, resident scholar at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute.

According to a New York Times poll in December, 60 percent of people who call themselves middle class think that if they work hard they will get rich. But the evidence suggests that goal is increasingly out of reach. When middle class people look up, they see the rich getting richer while they spin their wheels.

“The middle has basically stayed the same; it hasn’t improved,” said Lawrence F. Katz, an economist at Harvard University.

What is the most frustrating to me is how the GOP continues to use religion and racism to sucker idiot voters to vote for Republicans even as the GOP pushes policies that will harm those very same voters.  Thus, if one wants upward social mobility, nowadays, one needs to move to Europe.