SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A press release, dated 11 May, posted to the White House Web site (archived copy) announces (all links and party affiliations were added by the submitter):
[...] the issuance of an executive order forming the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Integrity. The President also named [Republican] Vice President Mike Pence as Chairman and Kansas Secretary of State [Republican] Kris Kobach as Vice-Chair of the Commission.
Five additional members were named to the bipartisan commission today:
Connie Lawson [Republican], Secretary of State of Indiana
Bill Gardner [Democratic], Secretary of State of New Hampshire
Matthew Dunlap [Democratic], Secretary of State of Maine
Ken Blackwell [Republican], Former Secretary of State of Ohio
Christy McCormick, Commissioner, Election Assistance Commission
[...]
The Commission on Election Integrity will study vulnerabilities in voting systems used for federal elections that could lead to improper voter registrations, improper voting, fraudulent voter registrations, and fraudulent voting. The Commission will also study concerns about voter suppression, as well as other voting irregularities. The Commission will utilize all available data, including state and federal databases.
Secretary Kobach, Vice-Chair of the Commission added: "As the chief election officer of a state, ensuring the integrity of elections is my number one responsibility. The work of this commission will assist all state elections officials in the country in understanding, and addressing, the problem of voter fraud."
Additional Commission members will be named at a later time. It is expected the Commission will spend the next year completing its work and issue a report in 2018.
According to Wikipedia's biography of Mr. Kobach (citation style changed by submitter):
Kobach has come to prominence over his hardliner views on immigration, as well as his calls for greater voting restrictions and a Muslim registry.[cite][cite][cite] Kobach regularly makes false or unsubstantiated claims about the extent of voter fraud in the United States.[cite]
As Secretary of State of Kansas, he has implemented some of the strictest voter ID legislation in the nation and has fought to remove nearly 20,000 properly registered voters from the state's voter rolls.[cite] After considerable investigation and prosecution, Kobach secured six convictions for voter fraud; all were cases of double voting and none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.
additional coverage:
- Washington Post
- ABC News
- Chicago Tribune (editorial)
- Los Angeles Times
- Atlanta Journal Constitution blog
- New York Times
- Kansas City Star
- The Nation
- American Civil Rights Union press release
- Rhode Island Public Radio
- Project Veritas
- Observer
- ABC News
- Fox News (archived copy)
- KCUR-FM
- NBC News
related stories:
Kansas Secretary of State Finally Convicts an Immigrant of a Voting Irregularity
Former Colorado GOP chairman charged with voter fraud
Hundreds of Texans may have voted improperly
Donald Trump is Filling Out His Transition Team
Hacking Voter Registration Data in Indiana
Study Finds Texas Voter Photo ID Requirement Discourages Turnout
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @10:58PM (6 children)
See "Greg Palast" up the (meta)thread.
Kobach's phony list contains 7 million names.
Assuming that each of his claimed "fraudulent voters" votes twice, that comes out to 3.5 million "fraudulent votes".
Kobach is a crook.
He's the ideal guy to pick if you want to rig things on a national scale.
He is well practiced in the art.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 15 2017, @02:17AM (5 children)
> Kobach's phony list contains 7 million names.
Despite over seven million "potential double voters" being "flagged" by the Crosscheck program in 2014, less than four people were charged, and not a single flagging led to a conviction, casting doubt on the system's reliability.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Voter_Registration_Crosscheck_Program [wikipedia.org]
article on the topic by Mr. Palast:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-stealth-war-against-voters-w435890 [rollingstone.com]
> He's the ideal guy to pick if you want to rig things on a national scale.
Yes. One critic speculated on the possibility that Interstate Crosscheck could become federal law. Another concluded that some Republican politicians "are willing to disenfranchise millions of people" so that their party may better retain power:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gops-state-by-state-crusade-to-disenfranchise-voters/2011/07/25/gIQAsMmpaI_story.html [washingtonpost.com]
Democratic Party politicians have done similar things when they were in the ascendancy.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/campaign/126295-democrat-part-still-disenfranchising-a-oppressing-votes [thehill.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @03:51AM (3 children)
Yeah. I made a submission [soylentnews.org] noting how long he has been at this stuff and how pitiful the results have been.
You can image how much public money he squandered over that span.
...as if Republican Gov. Sam Brownback hasn't already put that state in a deep enough hole with his (doomed from the start) Reaganomics experiment.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Monday May 15 2017, @04:53AM (2 children)
> I made a submission [...]
I noticed that. I had linked it, and one by Runaway1956, in my submission for this story.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @06:33AM (1 child)
Ah, you -are- on top of this.
Gotta get up pretty early to get ahead of you.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @07:39AM
I merely searched for related submissions and stories, as I usually do. But thank you for the compliment. --butthurt
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @10:34AM
> Democratic Party politicians have done similar things when they were in the ascendancy.
That article is a lot of baloney.
The author concedes every single example of democrats suppressing voters was corrected by other democrats. A handful of jerks brought into line by the party is the opposite of a systemic problem with the party. There will always be individual bad actors. A party's behavior is defined by how it deals with those bad actors. The republicans have embraced it as a tactic. The democrats have rejected it.
Meanwhile, half of the article is spinning of democrats enfranchisement of voters (like same-day registration) as 'corrupt.'
All of it becomes clear when reading the last line of the article, a description of the author, "Thielen is the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA)." The guy is just trying to provide cover for republican tactics. I skim the TheHill everyday and I've noticed that a lot of opinion pieces there are nothing more than disingenuous false equivalencies designed to provide cover for one party's immorality. Both parties do that on TheHill but one party does it a lot more than the other.