Tag: GOP voter suppression

How the Republicans went all in on white nationalism and voter suppression — and even worse may be yet to come

Every time I go back and read my December 2015 piece on Donald Trump and the missing white voters of the 2012 election, I get a sick feeling in my stomach. I had identified exactly how the Republicans could win the 2016 election, but I just couldn’t bring myself to believe they would pull it off. In truth, that piece should be bracketed by two other pieces of analysis I did on this subject. The earliest came in July 2013 when I wrote about the Republicans’ decision to drop “the idea that they need to do better with Latinos and adopt the idea that they need to do even better with white voters.” The latter one was written a few days after Donald Trump was elected president. I called it “Avoiding the Southification of the North.”

All three articles talk about the future of the Republican Party in the context of their demographic challenges. As the country becomes more ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse, the GOP loses market share. The same happens as young people replace old people in the electorate. The Republicans could respond by abandoning some conservative principles. But they would rather try every other option first. One strategy is to use their power to shift the electorate in their favor. By making it harder for young people to vote and by using every available tool to discourage minority voting, they hope to win a few more elections before they have to actually appeal to these voters. Another strategy is to get white people to think as white people. Here is how I described this in my 2013 piece:

Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.

View the complete May 17 article by Martin Longman from the Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

Voter Purges Prevent Eligible Americans from Voting

The following article by Danielle Root and Liz Kennedy was posted on the Center for American Progress website January 4, 2018:

Credit: Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

On January 10, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, et.al., a case that will determine whether states can remove individuals from voter rolls for simply failing to vote in previous elections. Every American has the fundamental right to vote, but from 2011 to 2014, Ohio removed a reported 846,000registered Americans from its voter rolls for infrequent voting over a six-year period. This removal was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act. Continue reading “Voter Purges Prevent Eligible Americans from Voting”

Democrats on Trump’s voter fraud commission urge leaders to be more transparent

The following article by Kurtis Lee was posted on the Los Angeles Times website October 25, 2017:

President Trump’s voter fraud commission, launched by executive order in May with the stated goal of restoring confidence and integrity in the electoral process, is now confronted with pushback from an unlikely group: its own members.

Two Democrats on the bipartisan commission sent letters to leaders of the panel last week condemning a lack of transparency.

“I honestly do not know what’s going on with the commission,” Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, the author of one of the letters, said on Wednesday. “This very much concerns me.” Continue reading “Democrats on Trump’s voter fraud commission urge leaders to be more transparent”

What’s At Stake In Supreme Court Gerrymander Decision

The following article by Steven Rosenfeld was posted on the National Memo website October 4, 2017:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard one of the most politically consequential cases in years, to decide whether partisan gerrymandering, or having elected politicians choose which voters do and don’t cast ballots in specific U.S. House and state legislative elections, is constitutional.

If you want to know why the GOP has not only controlled the House but has supermajorities in states that should be politically purple, such as North Carolina and Georgia, the answer is extreme partisan gerrymandering. Continue reading “What’s At Stake In Supreme Court Gerrymander Decision”

Distorted Districts, Distorted Laws

The following article by Billy Corriher and Liz Kennedy was posted on the Center for American Progress website September 19, 2017:

States must redraw their election districts every 10 years, based on the U.S. census, in order to account for changes in population.1 In most states, legislatures are responsible for redrawing the maps.2 State legislators can manipulate district boundaries to benefit their political party, either by cramming the other party’s voters into as few districts as possible or by thinly spreading the other party’s voters among districts where they are outnumbered.3 This manipulation, called gerrymandering, weakens voters’ ability to affect election outcomes. Technological advances have meant that states with gerrymandered districts have maps that are even more skewed than ever before.4 Recent polling shows that the vast majority of Americans—of both political parties—oppose partisan gerrymandering.5 Continue reading “Distorted Districts, Distorted Laws”

Kris Kobach and Kansas’ SAFE Act

The following article by Chelsie Bright was posted on the Conversation website July 27, 2017:

A Kansas voter prepares to cast her ballot – and prove her identity – in the 2014 midterm elections. AP Photo/Charlie Riedel

If you want to understand President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission, it helps to study what happened in Kansas.

Six years before Trump was tweeting about stolen electionsand unsubstantiated claims of millions of fraudulent votes, Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, was promoting the idea that widespread voter fraud threatens the integrity of our electoral system.

It should come as no surprise that Trump chose Kobach to be the vice chairman of Vice President Mike Pence’s new Commission on Election Integrity. This appointment gives Kobach a national platform by which to pursue his agenda.

Kansas’ voter ID law went into effect when I was a graduate student at the University of Kansas. The pervasive campaign promoting the new law piqued my interest. My co-author and I set out to assess the impact advertisements – specifically, the “Got ID?” campaign – had on voter turnout during the 2012 election. Continue reading “Kris Kobach and Kansas’ SAFE Act”

Pence’s voter fraud commission will almost certainly ‘find’ thousands of duplicate registrations that aren’t duplicates. Here’s why.

The following article by Stephen Pettigrew and Mayya Komisarchik was posted on the Washington Post website July 27, 2017:

Donald Trump and Mike Pence, CBS screen grab

Did Vice President Pence commit voter fraud?

You might think so, if you looked at voter registration data that only includes each voter’s name and birth year. Mike Pence registered to vote eight times and cast seven ballots across six states in the November 2016 election.

But you would be wrong. Each of these registration records belongs to a different person. Their only crime is that they share their name and were born in the same year as the vice president. Continue reading “Pence’s voter fraud commission will almost certainly ‘find’ thousands of duplicate registrations that aren’t duplicates. Here’s why.”

How the Failed Trump Effort to Create a ‘National Voter Database’ Could Actually Help the GOP Dominate in Future Elections

The following article by Steven Rosenfeld was posted on the AlterNet website July 5, 2017:

Looking beyond the buffoonish politics of the moment exposes the darker reality of what Kobach is really up to.

Many people who believe in expanding voting rights are marveling at the clumsy bid by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach for doing the one thing that was guaranteed to deeply offend almost every top state election official—demanding they fork over their detailed statewide voter files to create a national voter database.

Before Kobach’s attempted data grab—which as of Thursday, 41 states said no way to—he was already known throughout the small world of state election administrators and lawyers as an unabashed vote suppressor and white nativist, helping groups to file numerous anti-immigrant lawsuits and author anti-immigrant laws. So it didn’t surprise many election insiders when he sent out a letter, as chair of Trump’s “election integrity” commission, demanding copies of their statewide voter databases, post-haste, including data that’s protected, like Social Security numbers. Continue reading “How the Failed Trump Effort to Create a ‘National Voter Database’ Could Actually Help the GOP Dominate in Future Elections”

GOP hypocrisy on election aid

The following commentary from the Editorial Board was posted on the Washington Post website February 12:

Maryland’s new voting machines going from electronic touchscreen to paper ballots that are fed through a machine. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

ONE WOULD imagine that, with President Trump and other Republicans questioning the integrity of the nation’s election systems, Congress would create an agency to help state and local officials run clean and efficient polls. In fact, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) already exists. At least for the moment: Despite all the GOP rhetoric about flawed elections, a GOP House committee voted along party lines last week to kill the commission. Continue reading “GOP hypocrisy on election aid”