Rigging the panel
The Campaign Legal Center reports:
Today, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) learned through a response to a FOIA Request from Feb. 15, 2017 that an employee with the Heritage Foundation pushed back on naming a single Democrat to the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity.
The employee wrote personally to Attorney General Jeff Sessions pushing back on even a single Democrat being named to the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity and discouraging the White House from naming mainstream Republican officials and/or academics to the commission.
You remember what this presidential commission is, right? It’s a faked-up pseudo-commission to dig up bogus “evidence” of massive voter fraud, so that Trump and his enforcers can get new voting restrictions passed that will keep Undesirables from voting.
The Heritage Foundation employee, whose name has been redacted by the Department of Justice, complained that the White House did not consult with their “experts” who “have written more on the voter fraud issue than anyone in the country on our side of the political aisle.” A few months later, President Donald Trump appointed Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation to the Pence-Kobach Commission. Mr. von Spakovsky is widely considered the architect of the voter fraud myth. These emails add to the mounting evidence that the commission has no interest in true bipartisanship or an open discussion of how to solve the real problems in our elections.
As if we ever thought they did. Trump has been lying about this issue since before he decided to run.
“Any commission tasked with looking at the integrity of our elections should be bipartisan and should not be trying to make voting harder,” said Trevor Potter, president of Campaign Legal Center (CLC), and a former Republican Chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). “Yet Secretary Kris Kobach, the vice-chair of the commission, continues to use his position to further his quest to undermine citizens’ right to vote. His demonstrably false claims about election results in New Hampshire leading up today’s meeting impugned the dignity of that state and were clearly intended to undermine our democracy rather than strengthen it.”
“Instead of addressing the numerous serious issues facing our democracy, the commission met today for a second time to discuss the same tired anecdotes and debunked methodology that it has already decided to use to justify new restrictive voting laws. These farcical meetings continue to validate the worst suspicions about the commission: that it is designed to shrink the electorate for partisan advantage.”
“One of the stated goals of this meeting was to discuss the effect of election integrity issues on voter confidence. If the commissioners were really interested in pursuing this, they might look at a genuine, demonstrated threat to American election integrity, such as foreign interference. For example, the recent revelations about Russian nationals illegally buying political ads on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign raise a serious issue that could legitimately undermine public confidence. This is a true issue of election integrity.”
This commission has no meaningful bipartisan credentials and its purpose is based on false charges of voter fraud that have already been repeatedly disproven.
A five-year long search during the George W. Bush administration turned up ‘virtually no evidence of voter fraud,’ according to the New York Times.
H/t Ari Berman:
Heritage Foundation wrote to Sessions & said voter fraud commission should exclude Dems & "mainstream Republicans" https://t.co/WV6DLEpfkA pic.twitter.com/X6lbOZWyqk
— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) September 12, 2017
How do this not cost the Heritage Foundation its 501(c)(3) status? Heritage’s “experts” advocate for voter registration activities that (a) would favor one candidate over another or (b) have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates. And, since Trump is already campaigning for 2020, all of this comes during a political campaign.
This might sound a bit ‘oh we’re so much better than you’, we’re not, but we still maintain a pretty good semblance of fairness.
NZ has it’s election in 2 weeks. On the campaign trail both of the leaders of the two major parties have defended their opposite number from unfounded claims by supporters. This in a tightly contested and otherwise quite robust campaign.
We have an independent Electoral Commission. That commission has specifically targeted the majority of get out and vote advertising at youth and specific ethnicities that have poor voting records. Additional polling stations and early voting stations have been set up in places likely to make it easier for those people to vote. If you’re concerned about democracy and actually want democracy to succeed, that’s an important step on the way.
Seconding Rob from the UK where we have very similar arrangements.
An independent, non-partisan federal electoral commission is definitely the way to go, but it’s hard to see how that would be constitutional in the US.
Even so, the Canadian experience shows that even an independent electoral commission can be undermined by a determined autocratic leader. After the electoral commission implicated the ruling Conservatives in widespread vote suppression and campaign finance fraud in the 2011 election, Stephen Harper responded by cutting the commission’s funding and passing a law neutralizing the commission’s ability to investigate election fraud and get out the vote. Naturally, the goal was to make it hard for students, indigenous people, the poor and immigrants to vote. And although the Conservatives lost the 2015 election, the election was plagued by voters being directed to non-existent polling stations, voters being assigned addresses in a different province, and voters being directed to two different polling locations, often in distant locations. Those of you in NZ and the UK, especially under May’s Tories, can’t afford to relax.