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. 

Trump Nominee's Illegal Vote Exposes the Voter-Fraud Charade

If one listens to Republicans - especially the vulgarian-in-chief in the White House - voter fraud is rampant and millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 presidential election.  The truth, of course, is something very different with study after study showing that voter fraud is rare and not a pressing concern for anyone other than Republicans who are increasingly desperate to disenfranchise voters as their aging white voter base literally dies off.  To win, the GOP must decrease the votes of minorities and younger voters who wisely see the GOP as an enemy of their own future and prosperity.  Thus, it is delicious irony that one of Der Trumpenführer's nominees cast an illegal vote in Virginia in last year's presidential election.  True, it wasn't part of any insidious plan, but it shows the farce of the Republican charade that voter fraud is a pressing national concern.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the issue and Jeffrey Gerrish's illegal vote.  Here are highlights:

Jeffrey Gerrish made a mistake. Not a big one, although he did break the law. But it’s a mistake many people make, and for the most part, they aren’t called out by the Senate Finance Committee and in the pages of The New York Times.

Most of the people who make the error, however, are not nominees of a president who has alleged that there were 3 to 5 million fraudulent votes cast in the 2016 election, or who empaneled a commission to consider voter fraud that is on a dubious hunt to try to validate that wild, unsubstantiated claim. Jeffrey Gerrish, however, is President Trump’s nominee to be deputy U.S. trade representative, so it happens that investigators realized he cast his vote in the 2016 election in Virginia, even though he had moved to Maryland—a far less competitive state in national elections.

Actually, Gerrish broke two laws. Although Virginia allows people to vote there 30 days after moving—after all, they probably know the candidates and issues in their old home best—he was outside that grace period. The Times adds: “A Trump administration official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the case in detail, said that Mr. Gerrish had a Virginia driver’s license at the time of the election and was under the impression that the state granted a longer grace period for former residents.” But Maryland also requires that new residents get a Maryland license within 60 days of moving, which he had not done. Of course, such laws about getting new licenses are routine and routinely ignored. Many people just wait for their old license to expire before getting a new one, no one gets hurt, and no one launches a commission of inquiry. But that’s just the point about Gerrish’s old vote. The story isn’t so much a gotcha on Gerrish as it is a statement about the folly of Trump’s vote-fraud commission. The commission is chaired by Vice President Pence, but its co-chair and driving force is Kris Kobach, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas. Kobach is a long-time advocate for tighter voting laws, which he says are needed because of widespread voter fraud. In particular, he’s concerned about what’s known as in-person voter fraud: Someone actually shows up and casts an unlawful ballot, either because they aren’t registered, because they’re registered unlawfully, or because they vote in someone else’s name. The problem is that this is highly unusual. Repeated studies have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare, . . .
 Kobach is particularly into the idea of databases of voter lists from various states, which can then be crosschecked against each other to find people who are unlawfully double-voting—or at least double-registered—in several states. That was the motivation behind his controversial request that states provide full voter rolls to the commission. The problem is that the technique has repeatedly failed to find widespread fraud, even as it produces lots of false positives from similar names. In one instance, Kobach dramatically announced more than 2,000 dead voters who were still on rolls, only for the supposedly dead to be revealed as still alive quite quickly. More recently, Kobach declared in a Breitbart column that there was proof of widespread fraud in New Hampshire, then saw the state’s secretary of state shred his claim. Many people, including some of Trump’s closest relatives and advisers, are registered in two states (probably because they, like most people, didn’t bother to cancel their old registrations), but also almost certainly don’t vote twice. When there really is in-person voter fraud, however, it’s probably more likely something like what Gerrish did. He’s not the first person to decide to vote in his old home in the hopes of casting a more consequential vote. . . . . This is illegal, but it’s unlikely to be prosecuted, and it’s also naively idealistic: Those occasional ballots mailed back home to Nevada and Ohio and Florida are unlikely to swing any election. The same is true for Gerrish’s ballot. Even with his vote, Clinton won Virginia by more than 200,000 votes, and she won Maryland by more than 700,000. Contra the Trump voting commission’s starting assumptions, there’s very little in-person voter fraud, and where it occurs, it’s usually individuals exercising poor judgment—not massive, coordinated campaigns that stuff the ballot boxes with Trump’s fictitious millions of illegitimate votes. Then again, that doesn’t make much of a story, does it?

I have heard Kobach in a number of interviews and try as much as he might to  pretend he's not a racist, he most certainly is one.  He's a white supremacists in all but formal affiliation with a white nationalist group.  Sadly, Kobach is all too representative of more and more of the GOP.  If one is not a white, heterosexual right wing Christian, they don't view you as fully human or someone they want having the right to vote. Just one more example of the "Christian values" of today's Republican Party. 

Kris Kobach - High Priest of the Voter Fraud Myth

While Jeff Sessions is busy seeking a crackdown on marijuana users as a means to disenfranchise blacks and youth with a goal of adding Republican electoral chances, Kris Kobach, the de facto head of President Trump’s commission on voting integrity, is seeking to use the myth of voter fraud to disenfranchise even more Americans.  Besides minority voters, Kobach is especially hostile to young voters who disapprove of the GOP by some 70+%.  College students are a particularly favored target of Kobach who I have heard on radio interviews engaging in lots of fancy footwork to hide his still very discernible racism.  Rather than admit that a majority of Americans dislike the GOP's increasingly Christofascist/white supremacist and pro-wealthy agenda, Kobach's solution is to mere winnow the voter pool to eliminate potential Democrat voters.  The man embodies some of the ugliest elements of today's GOP.  A main editorial in the Washington Post looks at the fraud Kobach seeks to work on the American public.  Here are excerpts:

NEW HAMPSHIRE is a small state whose biggest residential college and university campuses are dominated by out-of-state students — tens of thousands of them. Under New Hampshire law, they are entitled to vote in state elections, an unremarkable and widely known fact that easily explains why several thousand ballots were cast there last November by voters who registered on Election Day using out-of-state driver’s licenses.

Yet to Kris Kobach, the de facto head of President Trump’s commission on voting integrity, those votes are somehow “proof” that an invading horde of out-of-staters took advantage of the Granite State’s same-day registration law to cast “fraudulent votes.” In fact, there’s no evidence of that.

The real fraud is Mr. Kobach himself, Kansas’s Republican secretary of state and a gubernatorial candidate, who will torture any truth, distort any data and fudge any fact in service to his long-standing goal of suppressing votes, specifically those likely to favor Democrats. Having established himself in his home state as a propagandist, he is now peddling his claptrap on the national stage.

His method is to cite real numbers, then draw risible and extravagantly sinister conclusions from them.

In the case of the Granite State, he cites official figures from last fall’s elections, when 6,540 voters registered to vote and cast a ballot on Election Day. Of those voters, more than 80 percent, or 5,313, had neither been issued a New Hampshire license nor registered a car in the state 10 months later.

Aha, says Mr. Kobach, writing at Breitbart, the right-wing website, “now there’s proof” of fraud: “It seems that they never were bona fide residents of the State.”

In fact, when New Hampshire Public Radio examined the data earlier this year, it found that more than two-thirds of 5,900 day-of-election registrants who had out-of-state driver’s licenses lived in college towns, indicating most were students voting perfectly legally. 

[O]n Tuesday Mr. Kobach attempted to defend his baseless claim at a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Under fire for his tendentious claims, which he used to cast doubt on the narrow victories in New Hampshire of Hillary Clinton and now-Sen. Maggie Hassan, both Democrats, he said: “Until further research is done, we will never know the answer regarding the legitimacy of this particular election.”

That’s Mr. Kobach at his most insidious, using innuendo, but never actual evidence, to impugn and subvert American democracy.
 

The fact that Kobach is a Breitbart columnist speaks volumes about his detachment from objective reality and his racist, alt-right tendencies.  It goes without say that his gubernatorial campaign webpage is hysterically anti-immigrant.  I can only wonder what he will try to concoct to disenfranchise LGBT voters three quarters of whom or more vote Democrat.   

Putin-Linked Think Tank Drew up Plan to Sway U.S. 2016 Election

The pathological liar that currently occupies the White House continues to deny that Russian efforts sought to throw the 2026 presidential election in his favor.  Likewise, he denies that he and his henchmen colluded in the Russian efforts.  Further, Vladimir Putin denies that Russia engaged in any such efforts.  Based on reports from Reuters, both Trump and Putin are lying. Documents obtained by American intelligence agencies reveal that a Putin directed Russian think tank drew up a detailed plan of actions to be used to sway the election and undermine American democracy in general.  The irony is that many far right American outlets that claim to be ultra-patriots in fact ran with the concocted lies that derived from Russian efforts.  Here are excerpts from Reuters:

A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.

They described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election. U.S. intelligence officials acquired the documents, which were prepared by the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies [en.riss.ru/], after the election.

The first Russian institute document was a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals.

It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said.

A second institute document, drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency, the seven officials said.

The current and former U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the Russian documents’ classified status. They declined to discuss how the United States obtained them. U.S. intelligence agencies also declined to comment on them.

Four of the officials said the approach outlined in the June strategy paper was a broadening of an effort the Putin administration launched in March 2016. That month the Kremlin instructed state-backed media outlets, including international platforms Russia Today and Sputnik news agency, to start producing positive reports on Trump’s quest for the U.S. presidency, the officials said.

Russia Today and Sputnik published anti-Clinton stories while pro-Kremlin bloggers prepared a Twitter campaign calling into question the fairness of an anticipated Clinton victory, according to a report by U.S. intelligence agencies on Russian interference in the election made public in January. [bit.ly/2kMiKSA]

Russia Today’s most popular Clinton video - “How 100% of the 2015 Clintons’ ‘charity’ went to ... themselves” - accumulated 9 millions views on social media, according to the January report. [bit.ly/2os8wIt]

The report said Russia Today and Sputnik “consistently cast president elect-Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional media outlets."

Neither of the Russian institute documents mentioned the release of hacked Democratic Party emails to interfere with the U.S. election, according to four of the officials. The officials said the hacking was a covert intelligence operation run separately out of the Kremlin.

The overt propaganda and covert hacking efforts reinforced each other, according to the officials. Both Russia Today and Sputnik heavily promoted the release of the hacked Democratic Party emails, which often contained embarrassing details.

Five of the U.S. officials described the institute as the Kremlin’s in-house foreign policy think tank. 

How much more will it take before my Republican "friends" who voted for Trump admit that they were played for fools?  Or were Trump's calls to racism and white supremacy all they really cared about?

Judge: Texas Voter ID Law Was Intended to Discriminate

As was the case in North Carolina, a Federal Court in Texas has ruled that Texas' voter ID was intentionally designed to discriminate against minorities.  For years now across America a key piece in the GOP's plan to remain in office (along with gerrymandering) has been to disenfranchise voters who oppose the GOP's increasingly racist and reverse Robin Hood agenda.  Actual voter fraud is extremely rare, yet one hears the Republicans fretting and lying about it endlessly.  A piece in the American-Statesman looks at the last ruling invalidating a GOP designed voter ID law.  Here are excerpts:

The Texas voter ID law was enacted in 2011 with the intent to discriminate against minority voters, a federal judge ruled Monday.

U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos dismissed Republican assertions that the identification law was intended to combat voter fraud, calling that rationale a “pretext” to suppress the voting rights of Hispanics and African Americans, who overwhelmingly support Democrats.

“There was no substance to the justifications offered for the draconian terms of SB 14,” the Corpus Christi judge said, concluding that the law known as Senate Bill 14 violated the U.S. Voting Rights Act.

Ramos’ ruling followed a July decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said the law had an improper and disproportionate impact on minority voters because they were less likely to have an acceptable government-issued ID, such as a driver’s license, U.S. passport or state handgun permit.

The appeals court returned the case to Ramos, who originally declared the law unconstitutional in 2014, to determine whether the voter ID law was intentionally written to be discriminatory.

On Monday, Ramos said it was — a conclusion she had also reached in 2014.

For example, the judge said, the voter ID law was “unduly strict.”

“Many categories of acceptable photo IDs permitted by other states were omitted from the Texas bill,” she wrote. “Fewer exceptions were made available. … The state did not demonstrate that these features of SB 14 were necessarily consistent with its alleged interest in preventing voter fraud or increasing confidence in the electoral system.”

Texas lawmakers also rejected a number of amendments that would have “softened the racial impact” of the law, said Ramos . . . .

Rejected amendments would have allowed additional types of identification, eased voter registration procedures, reduced ID costs and paid for increased voter education on how to comply with the law’s restrictions, the judge noted.

Ramos also said evidence did not support Republican contentions that the voter ID law was intended as a remedy for voter fraud.

“The evidence before the Legislature was that in-person voting, the only concern addressed by SB 14, yielded only two convictions for in-person voter impersonation fraud out of 20 million votes cast in the decade leading up to SB 14’s passage,” Ramos wrote. “And the bill did nothing to address mail-in balloting, which is much more vulnerable to fraud.”

In addition to returning the voter ID case to Ramos last summer to determine discriminatory intent, the federal appeals court ordered the judge to establish appropriate identification rules to be used in last November’s general election.

Ramos responded by ordering poll workers to accept a wider range of identification for Texans without a photo ID, including a voter registration certificate, birth certificate, current utility bill, bank statement or government check. Registered voters who presented alternative IDs had to fill out and sign a declaration indicating why they couldn’t acquire a government ID, such as a lack of transportation, disability, illness, work schedule or theft.

The Texas Legislature is currently considering two Republican-drafted bills that seek to adopt many of the loosened rules set by Ramos.

Ignoring Trump at Our Peril

Never in my lifetime have I felt so much animosity toward or fear of a president of the United States, and that includes Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.  The latter two certainly had their psychological issues but despite policy disagreements and active dislike of them, I never viewed them as insane.  That cannot be said for Der Fuhrer who increasingly displays a deeply disturbed personality more akin to Hitler or Stalin than John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson.  Yet disturbingly, far too many Americans continue to act like sleep walkers ignoring the clear and present danger Trump poses to not only America but the world at large.  We are at risk perhaps more so than ever in our history.  A column in the Washington Post argues that we are at great peril.  Here are highlights:

Where to begin? That’s the daily question for anyone trying to follow the words and deeds of the new administration, which is like drinking from two fire hoses — one gushing policy, the other spewing insanity.

Neither stream can be ignored. I wish I could agree with those who say we should pay little attention to President Trump’s verbal eruptions and focus only on concrete actions, but I can’t. It matters that the most powerful man in the world insists on “facts” that are nothing but self-aggrandizing fantasy. It matters that the president of the United States seems incapable of publicly admitting any error. It matters that Trump’s need for adulation appears to be insatiable.

The president’s most acute obsession is with the false notion that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton only because of widespread election fraud committed by “millions” of people.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan(R-Wis.) is among the many officials who have acknowledged there is zero evidence of the kind of fraud Trump alleges. It simply did not happen.

At a meeting with congressional leaders on Monday, Trump cited a different piece of purported proof, according to the New York Times: He told a story about how professional golfer Bernhard Langer tried to vote in Florida on Election Day but was not allowed to do so, while suspicious-looking voters ahead of and behind him, possibly Latin American immigrants, were permitted to cast provisional ballots.

[T]his simply did not happen. Langer indeed lives in Florida but is a German citizen. He has never voted in this country.

Why is any of this important? Because Trump, relying on a misinterpreted study and a garbled anecdote, has called for a “major investigation” of all this nonexistent voter fraud. He now has the vast resources of the Justice Department at his disposal, which means that if he wants a big investigation, he can have one. 

Trump’s fixation on his own popularity, or lack thereof, dovetails with the Republican Party’s long-standing political interest in minimizing the electoral weight of Democratic “urban” strongholds — meaning cities with large populations of minorities and liberals. We should prepare for a GOP attempt to channel Trump’s delusion into the rational, but nefarious, purpose of voter suppression.

Another example is Trump’s insistence on the value of torture in the fight against terrorism. Trump pledged during the campaign to bring back waterboarding and “much worse.”  . . . . How can allies fully share intelligence with the United States if they believe captured suspects may be tortured?

Trump’s off-the-wall statements and Twitter rants cannot be dismissed as mere attempts to distract. We have a president who is obsessed with his public standing, given to outlandish statements, eager to believe in conspiracy theories and unwilling to admit when he is wrong. To our peril, his character and moods will shape his policies.