Non-White Vote Purge Architect Kris Kobach Lied Over & Over About Claims of Voter Fraud

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Bloomberg

If President Donald Trump wants a good gauge of how much voter fraud he will find if he launches a federal investigation, one of his campaign advisers, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, is a good person to ask.

Kobach, you might remember, became a national hero among conservatives by championing restrictions on voting, with the avowed purpose of battling the scourge of voter fraud. During Trump's presidential transition, he was photographed meeting Trump while holding a document listing plans to bar foreigners and deal with "criminal aliens." Illegal immigration and voter fraud are intimately linked in conservative mythology, where dusky undocumented immigrants are forever handing election victories to Democrats by voting illegally.

Kobach is a smart lawyer and a skillful salesman. "Voter fraud is a well-documented reality in American elections," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal after becoming Kansas's secretary of state in 2011.

Well-documented.

In the essay, Kobach cited a 2010 state representative race in Kansas City, Missouri, that was "stolen" when one candidate allegedly received more than 50 votes illegally cast by Somali citizens. 

In his own state of Kansas, Kobach continued, 221 incidents of voter fraud were reported between 1997 and 2010. And even as a newbie in his office, he wrote, he had already found 67 aliens illegally registered to vote. The total number, he said, "will likely be in the hundreds."

A stolen election. Hundreds of incidents of voter fraud. And 67 aliens. Kobach claimed he had the proof. Yet there were some nagging little words -- alleged, reported.

How was the allegation of illegal Somali votes resolved? According to the Kansas City Star, suits were filed claiming illegal voting by Somalis, but no proof could be found.

What about the 221 instances of reported voter fraud? As it happened, Kansans reported more sightings of UFOs between 1997 and 2010 than instances of voter fraud -- people report all sorts of things -- even though more than 10 million votes were cast in that period in statewide elections alone.

And, of course, Kobach's final point -- that aliens had registered to vote -- is the ultimate tell. Why is Kobach talking about registration when the crime is fraudulent voting? Could it be that he had no evidence of fraudulent votes at all?

Kobach's Wall Street Journal essay was hardly an anomaly. Running for office in 2010, he said ballots were being cast by Kansas voters who were actually dead. He even named one politically active corpse, Alfred K. Brewer. But Brewer vehemently denied the charge -- at least the part about being dead.

Kobach had a good thing going, misleading conservatives eager to believe his spiel, along with others too busy to check the fine points of shifty language. But then he made a costly error. He asked the Kansas Legislature to give him the power to investigate and prosecute the rampant voter fraud that he kept claiming was taking place. In 2015, he was granted his wish.

"His powers are pretty broad," e-mailed Micah Kubic, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. "He can investigate at will, and prosecute 'voting crime' (not just fraud, per se) at will."

I asked Kobach's office for his voting fraud record. An aide sent me an Excel spreadsheet of his charges and prosecutions. He's had eight cases in Kansas since 2015, and six convictions. His first four convictions all involved American citizens age 60 or over, including a 77-year-old. 

The paltry results in Kansas are no surprise. In a nationwide study released in 2014, law professor Justin Levitt found 31 credible cases -- cases, not convictions -- of in-person voter fraud in a pool of 1 billion votes cast nationally. The George W. Bush administration conducted an aggressive voter-fraud investigation that concluded in 2007 with little to show for the effort. 

"So is Kobach chastened by his failings?" asked the Kansas City Star. "Heck, no. He recently doubled down on his ugly and unsubstantiated attacks on immigrants while defending voter ID laws."

If Trump is foolish enough to pursue a federal investigation of voter fraud to soothe his hurt feelings about losing the popular vote, he will face the same reality that exposed Kobach. "His record on prosecutions is dismal," noted Kubic of the ACLU.

Smart Republicans understand that voter fraud is a political slogan, not a pervasive problem. That's why Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell demurred when asked whether Trump should embark on a goose chase of his own. House Speaker Paul Ryan said he has seen "no evidence" that fraud influenced the election.

Trump lacks their political discipline or grasp of reality. And there is good reason to fear that any investigation ordered by Trump would merely be a pretext for further vote-suppression efforts. But perhaps Kobach will convince the president that actually investigating fraud is a bad idea, since it will only serve to expose a very different kind of fraud. 

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Women of color are front and center in the anti-Trump resistance

ThinkProgress

Before interim Attorney General Sally Yates was promptly dismissed Monday night, she received national applause for refusing to enforce President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. “At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities, nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful,” she wrote to her Department of Justice colleagues on Monday.

It’s hard to say whether or not Yates knew she’d be dumped for her defiance, but her bold action showcased a trend that’s becoming more evident by the day: women are leading the resistance against Trump.

What’s even more striking is that women of color are front and center in the opposition movement. As the fight against the 45th President enters its second week, here are some of those women:

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)

Waters neither supported Trump during his campaign — she called him a “liar and a trickster” last September — nor kept her criticism to herself after his election.

During an MSNBC interview in December, she said she had “no intention in pretending everything is alright” and would “fight him every inch of the way” as a member of the Financial Services Committee. She said she wouldn’t go to the White House if Trump called, and vowed to “show the American people that they too cannot trust him.”

Waters was one of several Congressional leaders who refused to attend Trump’s inauguration.

In her capacity as a sitting member of the Congressional Black Caucus, she promised to fight Trump’s attorney general nominee, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), because of his racist track record. And on Tuesday, Waters also announced a bill to demand that Trump be investigated for his dealings with Russia. [MORE]

Waking Up the Dead! How Moronic Trump Unleashed a Wave of Dissent

Village Voice

A day after President Trump issued a sweeping and almost certainly illegal executive order Friday afternoon allowing immigration officers to refuse entry to people from seven Muslim-majority countries—even if they are carrying valid visas, have green cards, are dual citizens, or are refugees—a federal judge in Brooklyn Saturday night imposed a stay on nationwide deportations under the order. [MORE]

NAACP Makes Statement on Trump's Orders Targeting [Non-White] Muslims and Immigrants

TheSkanner

NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks issued the following statement in response to multiple executive orders issued in the first week of the Trump Administration, including orders banning refugees, targeting visitors from Muslim countries and detaining people with legal permits to visit, live and work in the United States:

“President Trump’s recent executive orders indicate a callous disregard for civil liberties and the basic values of a nation born of immigrants. The President’s decision to sever funding for sanctuary communities places our nation on slippery slope fueled more by paranoia than fact.

Not only are immigrant sanctuary communities contributing solidly to local economies, but they have significantly less crime than other communities. In the initial actions of this new administration, we see are seeing a clear pattern that threatens our communities and our democracy.

There is a direct link between fostering an unnecessary enmity between police and immigrant communities and nationalizing “stop and frisk” policies, while building walls of exclusion and seeking to name Senator Jeff Sessions, an enemy of both police accountability and the vote, as attorney general.

When we connect these dots, we realize the collective threat posed to our democracy and the need to unite.”

The remarks were part of a joint statement on the Trump presidency’s impact on communities of color issued by the NAACP and 11 other civil and human rights groups in conjunction with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. 

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It is hard to overstate just how thin the evidence is for the claim of mass illegal voting

Intercept

For two months now, Donald Trump has appeared unable to accept the verdict of November’s election: that he is more popular than many of us wanted to believe, but less popular than Hillary Clinton.

As a result of this fixation, he is now promising “a major investigation” into the election that made him president, putting the full weight of the federal government behind his quest to prove that at least three million ballots were cast against him by “those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and even, those registered to vote who are dead.”

In an interview with David Muir of ABC News broadcast on Wednesday night, Trump tried to suggest that a 2012 Pew study on problems with people being registered in two states, or the voter rolls not being updated as soon as people die, was proof that illegal voting was taking place.

When Muir pointed out that the author of the Pew study, David Becker, had said that his work did not show any voter fraud, Trump, who clearly had not read the study, suggested, wrongly, that he had somehow retracted his research. Specifically, Trump accused Becker of “groveling,” just as he had when attacking Serge Kovaleski of The New York Times for undercutting his lie that thousands of Arab-Americans celebrated 9/11 in New Jersey. [MORE]

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Trump vows to cut funding for #SanctuaryCities, but makes an exception for law enforcement purposes

Reason

Today President Donald Trump made good on his threat to go after "sanctuary cities" (cities that decline to investigate the immigration statuses of people within their jurisdiction) by going after their federal funds. He signed an executive order today attempting to implement a policy denying federal grants for any of these 200 estimated sanctuary cities if they refuse to assist the federal government in investigating immigration statuses.

One problem that was brought up in November after Trump's election: Law enforcement agencies and unions didn't support this mechanism of intimidating cities. It wasn't that they cared so much about the civil liberties. They were not going to support anything that prevented any sort of gravy train from rolling into their police stations. Law enforcement agencies are prime recipients of federal grants.

Trump, having run on a hard core law-and-order, stop-and-frisk, civil-rights-are-for-wusses campaign, was not interested in angering these guys. So his executive order today explicitly exempts grants "deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes."

Trump is also calling for the administration to publicize, on a weekly basis, a list of crimes committed by aliens "and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens." One assumes these must be aliens the federal government detain or arrest after sanctuary city interactions. Otherwise there's a bit of a logic flaw in trying to highlight criminals who are illegal immigrants operating in cities that refuse to check their immigration status and report that information to the feds. [MORE]

Florida judge accused of saying blacks should ‘go back to Africa’ resigns before he can be impeached

Raw Story

A white Florida judge who was accused of making sexist and racist remarks has stepped down from his position, just before the Florida Legislature was set to launch an impeachment investigation into his conduct.

The Tampa Bay Times reports that Jacksonville Circuit Judge Mark Hulsey submitted his resignation letter to Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Monday, “on the eve of the start of a highly unusual impeachment investigation by the Legislature.”

The 66-year-old Hulsey was facing a probe by the Judicial Qualifications Commission, which was investigating accusations that the judge called a female staff attorney a “b*tch” and a “c*nt,” as well as an accusation that he said black people should “get on a ship and go back to Africa.”

Although Hulsey denied these allegations when they first surface, the Florida Legislature’s House Public Integrity & Ethics Committee was scheduled to have a hearing Tuesday to present a “report on preliminary findings” of its initial investigation.

Hulsey’s decision to step down was apparently a preemptive move to head off the hearing, as Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran (R-Land O’Lakes) said that the judge “resigned under the threat of the investigation.” [MORE]

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Trump’s Wall And The Missing Media Context: Undocumented Immigration Is On The Decline

Media Matters

In signing an executive order last week ordering the “immediate construction of a physical wall” along the United States’ border with Mexico, President Donald Trump generated exactly the news coverage he wanted: articles highlighting the president’s unprecedented action that could give the impression he’s addressing a surging problem of undocumented immigrants flooding into the United States.

The New York Times reported that Trump had begun “a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration.” The paper stressed, “Taken together, the moves would turn the full weight of the federal government to fortifying the United States border,” and that Trump’s plan “called for a newly expanded force to sweep up immigrants who are in the country illegally.”

According to The Washington Post, “President Trump on Wednesday began putting in place his plan to ratchet up immigration enforcement.”

And The Associated Press stressed that, “President Donald Trump moved aggressively to tighten the nation's immigration controls Wednesday,” noting “Trump cast his actions as fulfillment of a campaign pledge to enact hard-line immigration measures.”

The tone of these pieces about his planned wall very much reflected Trump’s get-tough rhetoric this week: He was taking aggressive action to stem a growing problem. “Beginning today, the United States gets control of its borders,” the president said this week. He told ABC's David Muir: “It’s going to be very hard to come in. Right now, it’s very easy to come in.”

But here’s the crucial context much of the coverage glossed over as reporters rushed to document Trump’s wall initiative: Overall the total number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States has been slightly declining over the past decade. Apprehensions at the U.S. border have generally been in decline over the past 16 years. And specifically, the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico who were stopped at the border has fallen in recent years, with the figure being cut in half since 2010. (There has been an increase in undocumented immigrants from Central America in recent years, but overall the total number of undocumented immigrants stopped at the border is a quarter of what it was in 2000.) 

Like his attempts to spread lies about the U.S. unemployment rate (not to mention lies about the size of his inauguration crowd), Trump’s argument for building a wall is built on the fabrication that America is under siege from undocumented immigrants.

It’s not.

While some publications, like the Huffington Post and Politico, included this crucial context for Trump’s wall proposal, each of those articles cited above from the Times, the Post and Associated Press, failed to note that Trump was proposing a radical fix for a dilemma already in decline. And that seems to have been the press pattern, as news updates downplayed or ignored the slower rate of immigration across the Mexican border. This NBC report doesn’t mention it until the 16th paragraph; this CNN report made no mention of it at all.

Clear-headed coverage that provides context for Trump’s colossal wall proposal should spell out that his multi billion-dollar construction projection is designed to address a problem that spiked 10 years ago when the total undocumented population hit an all-time high.The press shouldn’t allow Trump to paint a portrait of America being overrun when that simply is not true. 

The failure is part of a larger problem where journalists allow Trump to create his own -- often dystopian -- realities about America. Like the way the president promised to fix the “carnage” of America during his inauguration address, and how he routinely insists the crime rate in this country is rocketing upward. 

It’s not.

The number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States peaked in 2007. There were 12.2 million undocumented immigrants in 2007 and 11.1 million in 2014, according to Pew Research Center estimates. (They are among the most recent figures available.) 

Those Pew numbers were reinforced by a 2016 study by demographer Robert Warren, which found that the number of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S had dropped to 10.9 million in 2014.

“One reason for the high and sustained level of interest in undocumented immigration is the widespread belief that the trend in the undocumented population is ever upward,” wrote Warren in his study for the Journal on Migration and Human Security. “This paper shows that this belief is mistaken and that, in fact, the undocumented population has been decreasing for more than a half a decade.”

Trump’s signature policy initiative of building a concrete wall along a nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico is based on a falsehood about undocumented immigrants. The press needs to include that central context.

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Starbucks Is Hiring 10,000 Refugees, Lyft Is Giving $1 Million To The ACLU

Fastcoexist

On Saturday, a day after Trump issued an executive order blocking refugees and citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S., Lyft announced that it was giving $1 million to the ACLU.

"Trump’s immigration ban is antithetical to both Lyft's and our nation's core values," CEO Logan Green tweeted.

The same day, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky tweeted that Airbnb is providing free housing to refugees and "anyone not allowed in the U.S." The company previously pledged to develop a program that would let Airbnb hosts temporarily take in refugees, along with creating jobs for Syrian refugees in Jordan. (The pledge was made under the former White House Partnership for Refugees, now run by Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya's Tent Foundation).

On Sunday, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz sent a letter to employees expressing his concern. "We are living in an unprecedented time, one in which we are witness to the conscience of our country, and the promise of the American Dream, being called into question," he wrote, and outlined what the company is doing in response.

Starbucks is planning to hire 10,000 refugees around the world in the next five years. The company also reimburses the fee paid by "Dreamers," the undocumented children of immigrants who are allowed to work under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, which Trump is considering ending. Schultz also talked about the importance of Mexico to Starbucks, both as a coffee supplier and a growing market.

Other business leaders expressed their anger about the new administration without announcing specific action. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote that Trump's actions are hurting Netflix employees and "are so un-American it pains us all" and that "it is time to link arms together to protect American values of freedom and opportunity." [MORE]

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