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U.S. President Establishes Commission on Election Integrity

posted by martyb on Sunday May 14 2017, @05:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-may-even-get-tired-of-integrity dept.

butthurt writes:

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:

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @06:53PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @06:53PM (#509576)

    You tl;dr morons can't even be bothered, huh? Or are you functionally illiterate? [snopes.com]:

    But it appears that, once again, O’Keefe’s videos are not be what they seem. The first serious questions about them were raised on (I swear!) The Blaze, a Glenn Beck-affiliated website.

    [...]
    It is now clear that O’Keefe’s editing of the raw video from his interview with NPR’s top fundraiser, Ron Schiller, was selective and deceptive. The full extent of this distortion was exposed by a rising conservative Web site, the Blaze. O’Keefe’s final product excludes explanatory context, exaggerates Schiller’s tolerance for Islamist radicalism and attributes sentiments to Schiller that are actually quotes by others — all the hallmarks of a hit piece … In this case, O’Keefe did not merely leave a false impression; he manufactured an elaborate, alluring lie.

    Interest in the four current Project Veritas videos has run high on social media. Politico addressed them from the perspective of legality, such as whether Project Veritas violated the law in Florida by ostensibly not adhering to the state’s wiretapping laws. The article also included a statement from Florida State Democratic Party spokesman Max Steele regarding the allegations about voter registrations:

            According to Max Steele, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, Mao or anyone else would lose their jobs for destroying voter-registration forms.

    “Sexual assault and harassment, and destruction of voter registration forms, are serious offenses,” Steele said in a written statement. “There is no question that a staff member who engaged in this kind of behavior would be immediately terminated, and we are investigating the claims. Remarks like these do not represent the Florida Democratic Party and are completely inappropriate.”

            The video neither shows nor alleges that anyone affiliated with Clinton’s campaign actually destroyed any forms. Florida Democrats are surpassing Republicans in signing up voters. The state party has submitted 503,000 voter registration forms for this election; the state Republican Party only 60,000. The Florida Democratic Party said it trains volunteers on proper handling of the registration forms and tracks the documents to make sure none is destroyed in violation of state law.

            Under state law, a “person may not knowingly destroy, mutilate, or deface a voter registration form or election ballot or obstruct or delay the delivery of a voter registration form or election ballot.” The third-degree felony carries a maximum five-year-prison term and $5,000 fine.

            However, the video itself could constitute a third-degree felony on the part of Project Veritas because of Florida’s law that requires consent before someone is recorded. A person must give explicit consent or give “implied consent” by continuing to talk after being told he or she is being recorded.

    As the piece noted, the “rigging” clip and claims of voter registration form destruction did not stem from activity surreptitiously recorded by Project Veritas. Instead, the viral video simply depicts an operative of the organization attempting to bait campaign workers into “admitting” they would tolerate such behavior. And as with the video involving Manhattan Board of Elections Commissioner Alan Schulkin, what Project Veritas’ targets appeared to be doing was going along with leading questions rather than disputing them.

    Now that your spoon-feeding is done, do you need a diaper change too?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @04:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @04:28AM (#509759)

    Everything you posted is talking about videos from 2011. The vast majority of their article is just a hit piece on the person doing the filming. Their only comments related to the video itself was:

    [quote]Project Veritas’ October 2016 election-related sting videos (embedded above) reveal tidbits of selectively and (likely deceptively edited) footage absent of any context in which to evaluate them. Unless his organization releases the footage in full, undertaking a fair assessment of their veracity is all but impossible. [/quote]

    Why didn't they simply contact the people recorded and get them to go on the record clarifying if and exactly how anything was taken out of context. For instance they could have had a side by side video of the people speaking clarifying the context of discussion. Again, I think articles like this are more about preaching to a choir rather than reaching out to inform people.