They're Still Trying

The data problem.  (The Atlantic, Vann Newkirk)

As You Know, Barb,

The tag/label I use for attempts at voter suppression and tales of voter "fraud" (there are more insect parts in your average hot dog than cases of actual voter "fraud," and most of it seems to be committed by Republicans.  Just saying.  Want to finish that hot dog?  There's a ball game this weekend) is, as I've mentioned the punch line to what may be a Dick Gregory sketch [Mr. Gregory was just slightly before my time and may not have been considered child-friendly] , which may refer to literacy tests, in which the prospective voter is handed a sheet in Chinese.  The Election Commissioner wants to bring this sort of stupid back.

Critics say the commission is a pretext for Republican efforts to make it harder to register and to vote, and that it will reach a predetermined conclusion, that tough new rules are needed to prevent fraud,” the Times noted. “Studies have repeatedly shown that illegal voting is very rare, and that voter impersonation — perhaps the main danger suggested by advocates of tighter election rules — is next to nonexistent.”

Those studies, however, don’t hold sway with Gardner, who told the paper that additional voting restrictions could be a boon to turnout.

(AlterNet, from Raw Story by David Edwards)

Yeah, really.

Dungeness and Draggings

• Damn.  Another rebuilding year.
• Arpaio convicted.  There's a slight chance he'd actually have to do time.

  Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio was convicted of a criminal charge Monday for refusing to stop traffic patrols that targeted immigrants, marking a final rebuke for a politician who once drew strong popularity from such crackdowns but was ultimately booted from office as voters became frustrated over his headline-grabbing tactics and deepening legal troubles.

• Scaramucci is Out.  Jurassicpork points at the nonexistent chaos at the White House.

  So now we have no:
  Secretary of the Army
  Secretary of the Navy
  Surgeon General
  Deputy Secretary of State
  [...]
  No strategy for defeating ISIS but a great one for combating a street gang and now no
  Communications Director or
  Director of Homeland Security.
  You know, Donnie Dumbo, I'm not as experienced as you in this presidenting business, but I do know one thing: When you're playing Musical Chairs, the idea is to have more people than open seats, not the other way around.

• Let's hope this isn't true.  (Trita Parsi, AlterNet)

  President Donald Trump has made it clear, in no uncertain terms and with no effort to disguise his duplicity, that he will claim that Tehran is cheating on the nuclear deal by October—the facts be damned. In short, the fix is in. Trump will refuse to accept that Iran is in compliance and thereby set the stage for a military confrontation. His advisors have even been kind enough to explain how they will go about this.

  There were no WMDs in Iraq. Anyone remember that?
  

• Tomi Lahren, conservative firebrand, bashes Obamacare while benefiting from it

  It's the headline.
  
• Driftglass.
• Zandar.
• Zandar on hacking the vote.
• ETA:  Shakesville.
• Not The Onion.

I'm trying to imagine all this as a Mel Brooks movie.

Dessert.

Yes, I know.

Heather Digby Parton at Salon about the "voter fraud" commission. (Hullabaloo.)

That’s an outrageous assertion. It is completely impossible that 3 million votes were cast illegally in 2016. In a world that makes sense he would have been fired immediately for casting such a shadow over the electoral results. There have been more than nine major investigations into alleged “voter fraud” and it just does not exist on even a small systematic scale much less something like what he’s suggesting.

[...]

But Trump needn’t worry. Kobach is a conservative extremist whose life’s work is preventing people from voting. That’s what this is about. Trump’s victory will never be questioned by him.

There is one slight mystery about all this, however. With all this talk of our electoral system being vulnerable to fraud the commission isn’t the least bit interested in the subject of Russian interference in the election. That seems odd.

Further Information

Stonekettle Station, which people I read link to occasionally (ETA:  and which I've previously linked to thrice apparently), has researched the Presidential Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity.

The most fervent believer in voter fraud after the most diligent and thorough investigation can’t produce more than one or two fraudulent voters, let alone millions. And they’ve tried. Goddamn have they tried.

This whole thing is nonsense.

He found interesting data.  Read the rest; it's really long and names names and cites their histories and spells out their agenda.   Informative and detailed.

Specialist Pound Cake

• I'm thawing/softening a stick of butter which may take forever.  
• I begin to suspect that God did, in fact, create perfect people to populate the planet, and then got Bored.
• Looking at Tom Price, who doesn't understand why the insurance companies don't want to return to pre-Obamacare practices:

  "But if you look at the Republican plan to modify it and replace it, more than 10 medical groups are against it. Thirty-two cancer organizations oppose it. And on Thursday, in a rare joint statement by the biggest insurance companies in the country, called the Cruz Amendment unworkable in any form and warned it would lead to, quote, 'widespread terminations of coverage.'
  
  "So, Dr. Price, why this wall of opposition?"

  (Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars)
  
• Looking at Rand Paul:

  So you're talking about fighting insurance companies in fifty different states -- often in states where those companies are based. Good luck with that!
  
  You're also talking about underwriting and administering all these smaller groups -- groups that won't save that much money because their risk pools aren't large enough.

  (Also Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars)
  
• The Rude Pundit:

  Republicans are saying, in word and action, that they hold their constituents in contempt. The voters are disposable. In fact, they are saying, let's help them along, whether by starving them or taking away their health care. And then let's make them thank us because, we can say, we kept our promises.

• Cornered?  (William Rivers Pitt, Truthout,  via Alternet)
• Sounding an alarm for conservatives:

  One of the reasons why the radical right was able to overcome conservatives back in the 1930s was that the conservatives did not understand the threat. Nazis in Germany, like fascists in Italy and Romania, did have popular support, but they would not have been able to change regimes without the connivance or the passivity of conservatives.

  (Timothy Snyder, The Guardian, via AlterNet)Also, some parts of them were in unspoken agreement with the fascists.
• Yastreblyansky tweets about the meeting with the Russians.  The comments are of interest, too.
• More efforts to reduce the number of registered voters (via twistedchick on dreamwidth).  In the name of Republican Satanic panic "voter fraud" "prevention," of course.

Fallout

• From Bluedot Daily:  Pastor John Pavlovitz addresses "embarrassed for the past 8 years" of some voters.

  Were you embarrassed by his eloquence, his quick wit, his easy humor, his seeming comfort meeting with both world leaders and street cleaners; by his bright smile or his sense of empathy or his steadiness—perhaps by his lack of personal scandals or verbal gaffes or impulsive tirades?
  
  No. Of course you weren’t.
  
  Honestly, I don’t believe you were ever embarrassed. That word implies an association that brings ridicule, one that makes you ashamed by association, and if that’s something you claim to have experienced over the past eight years by having Barack Obama representing you in the world—I’m going to suggest you rethink your word choice.
  
  You weren’t “embarrassed” by Barack Obama.
  
  [...]
  
  But I don’t believe it had anything to do with his resume or his experience or his character or his conduct in office—because you seem fully proud right now to be associated with a three-time married, serial adulterer and confessed predator; a man whose election and business dealings and relationships are riddled with controversy and malfeasance. You’re perfectly fine being represented by a bullying, obnoxious, genitalia-grabbing, Tweet-ranting, Prime Minister-shoving charlatan who’s managed to offended all our allies in a few short months. And you’re okay with him putting on religious faith like a rented, dusty, ill-fitting tuxedo and immediately tossing it in the garbage when he’s finished with it.

  The whole thing is pretty pointed; the original is on the pastor's website.  With 1,000 + comments.  (Apparently I accidentally closed the originating tab.  Sorry.)
• So.  Some folks at Faux News are "concerned" that the Obamas are vacationing.

  If you thought that becoming a private citizen meant that former President Barack Obama could take a vacation without being scolded by Fox News, think again.
  
  Fox’s excuse this time is that it’s “just reporting” on left-wing criticism. Recently, on FoxNews.com, reporter Christopher Wallace (who does not appear to be the Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace) wrote an article titled, “Obamas under fire from the left for never ending, sizzling ultra-luxury vacations.”

  (News Hound Ellen, Crooks and Liars)
• Meanwhile:  Golf vacation infomercials??
• In Department of You Didn't Really Want the Answers, So You Shouldn't Have Asked the Question:  Indiana Republicans asked for "Obamacare Horror Stories."

  The Hill quoted one commenter who said that the “only horror story is that Republicans might take it away.”
  
  “I love OBAMACARE! It has helped our family. Shame on the REPUBLICANS wanting to get rid of it… BLOOD will be our your hands!!!” said another commenter.

  (AlterNet, reprinting RawStory). From Shakesville:

  My favorite coverage of this debacle is, naturally, the Indy Star's, where Ryan Martin writes with perfect Hoosier kindness that "The responses were unexpected" and "Many seemed to relish that the post didn't receive more horror stories." Ha.

  Remember to continue to contact your Senator.
  
• 44 states are refusing to hand over voter data to the Kobach "voter fraud" commission.  (Yes, it is Little Green Footballs.  Deal.  Zandar pulls together some of the state objections.

  The Trump regime's plan to assemble a national database of voters under the guise of "voter integrity" has run into not one but two buzzsaws: blue states understand full well that the information will be used for targeted voter suppression purposes, but red states know that voter registration systems have been completely compromised by the Russians. Neither group trust the incompetent Trump regime and now 44 states have rejected participation in the scheme.

Protecting Us From Zombie Voters. Suuuuuuuuuuuure, He Is.

John Amato, Crooks and Liars:

There is no verifiable evidence to suggest the U.S. has a voter fraud problem by any measure imaginable, b[ut] frauds like Kobach are only interested in purging voters from the state rolls and enacting Voter ID laws so they have come up with their "dead people" nonsense to try and give them some leverage to proceed.

Video clip and partial transcript of interview at Media Matters.

(My father still gets [junk] mail, and he's been dead for over 10 years, but I rather doubt he's still voting.)

And Incidentally...

• Via Zandar Versus the Stupid:
• Caitlin Owens, Axios, notes that Ted Cruz has proposed health insurance deregulation such that:

  The bottom line: That would give Republicans a better idea of the impact of his proposal, which would let insurers sell health plans that don't meet Affordable Care Act standards — including, potentially, waiving the pre-existing condition rules — as long as they also sell plans that comply with all of the ACA insurance regulations.

• Jack Moore at GQ's take:

  Anyway, Cruz, in his typical pompous ass way, believes he has solved the Senate's health care bill. His proposal is designed to allow moderate Republicans who are still on the fence to claim they saved the Obamacare protections that are popular with voters while simultaneously allowing insurers to offer plans that don't include such protections, thus costing the government less and pleasing hard-line right-wingers like Cruz. If you're thinking to yourself, how the hell would that work? The short answer is that it wouldn't.

• Robert Reich minces no words.
• Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky Secretary of State, bluntly dismissed "voter fraud" commission.

  Lundergan Grimes was well prepared to discuss Trump's phony voter fraud commission at length and replied, "If Donald Trump asked for not only your address but date of birth, political affiliation and entire voting history along with last four digits of your social security number, would you give it to him?"
  
  She continued, "The answer from Kentucky and states around the United States is a resounding no. There is no state fully complying with what has been a request from a sham commission that the president set up to try to create and find evidence to back up a lie that has simply been disputed..."

  (John Amato, Crooks and Liars)
• Ilana Novak at AlterNet summarizes Paul Krugman's Monday New York Times column, which suggests that Trump is trying to start a trade war.  Not good.
• Real headline at the SF Gate.com:  Trump accuses Clinton of colluding with Democrats to defeat 'Crazy Bernie Sanders'
• Zandar, citing New York magazine, says Justice Anthony Kennedy may be retiring next year, and why that is bad.
• More Zandar:  Lowered rates of unemployment and disparate electoral results.
• Jesse Curtis:  "On Taking Action For Black Lives"  Read this or stop pretending to be an activist.
• Annoying Anti-Feminists.  (Alas, A Blog)

Furthermore

*ahem*

While the rest of the Sunday shows spent the bulk of their time focusing on Trump's tweets (thereby justifying the distraction technique perfectly), Joy Ann Reid had on writer Ari Berman to discuss Trump's voter fraud commission, headed by Kris Kobach.

Nicole Belle, Crooks and Liars.  Video of Ms. Reid talking to Mr. Berman, who writes for the New York Times magazine.

There are more Martians in the State Department than cases of voter fraud.

Nits

Nits are the eggs of lice.

I swung by Eschaton this morning.  I think because The Rectification of Names's blogroll listed it as having something entitled "Everyone With A Name Match Will Be A Vote Fraudster," and as I wrote a couple of years ago:

Even 2,000,000 (that's two million; you wouldn't want to scan that data by hand) names are going to have duplicates and triplicates, not from fraud, but from the fact that people have names, not numbers. And get named after their parents and may live with said parent, y'know, at the same address. Or have common first names paired with common last names. Not everyone names the baby after characters in movies and operas, and some people legally change what they're called. And I seem to remember that an awful lot of people whose only crime, you should excuse the expression, was having the same names as convicted felons were stricken from voter rolls in Florida in 2012.

Mr. Kobach, who was the [pejorative noun] involved with Interstate Crosscheck, is now vice chair of the voter "integrity" commission and has called for states' voter databases.

In their letter, they request states provide "the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, cancelled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information."

(Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars)  In the comments appeared a press release from Virginia's Governor McAuliffe refusing the request for data, which said:

“I have no intention of honoring this request. Virginia conducts fair, honest, and democratic elections, and there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in Virginia. This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November. At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.

“The only irregularity in the 2016 presidential election centered around Russian tampering, a finding that has been confirmed by 17 of our intelligence agencies and sworn testimony delivered to several congressional committees

(National Review believes Gov. McAuliffe is soft on voter fraud.  Consider the source.)

Shakesville points at the slippery slope to voter suppression.

Texas

...has had to modify their voter ID law.

The bill signed into law by Gov. Abbott on Thursday night mirrors much of this court order, making similar restrictions on the Texas voter ID law permanent.

Again, this is not a total victory for voting rights. The law still imposes an ID requirement on most voters, and some voters may be intimidated by the fact that they risk jail time if they make a false statement on their declaration of reasonable impediment.

Texas also filed court documents Thursday night claiming that its changes to its voter ID law should erase the federal court’s finding that the state acted with racially discriminatory intent. If the courts ultimately agree with this argument, that will limit the remedies available to voting rights advocates who want to ensure that Texas does not engage in additional voter suppression.

But the new Texas law also locks in place restrictions on the state’s voter suppression efforts that it could have just as easily fought in court.

ThinkProgress, via skippy

Wisconsin Voter ID

"Not a single voter in this state will be disenfranchised by the ID law," Lazich promised.

Comedy gold.  As usual, a lie.

Another Rebuke to Texas

"Because I told you befo--ore, You Can't Do That."

It amounted to the second finding of intentional discrimination in Texas election laws in as many months — a separate court in March ruled that Republicans racially gerrymandered several congressional districts when drawing voting maps in 2011, the same year the voter ID rules were passed.

[...]

The Texas law requires voters to show one of seven forms of identification at the ballot box. That list includes concealed handgun licenses — but not college student IDs — and Texas was forced under court order last year to weaken the law for the November elections.

Oh, And...

Remember the Alabama Voter ID/DMV office closing story?  Because it turns out that there's more there than met the eye.  Zandar reports:

So yeah, the Governor's mistress very much wanted to keep black people in Alabama from being able to vote, and wanted to do so in a way that "protected" her lover. Nice lady, huh. Meanwhile, the impeachment proceedings against Bentley continue, and the former state AG? He's now Senator Luther Strange, Jeff Sessions's replacement.

Full article Zandar is citing, with more links.

ETA (4/9):  Bentley's been a bad, bad boy, even by Alabama standards.

Spelling It Out

• Robert Reich at AlterNet:

  Meanwhile, Congress is in the hands of Republicans who for years have only said “no,” who have become expert at stopping whatever a president wants to do but don’t have a clue how to initiate policy, most of whom have never passed a budget into law, and, more generally, don’t much like government and have not shared responsibility for governing the nation.
  
  As a result of all this, the most powerful nation in the world with the largest economy in the world is rudderless and leaderless.
  
  Where we need thoughtful resolve we have thoughtless name-calling. Where we need democratic deliberation we have authoritarian rants and rallies. Where we need vision we have myopia.

• Mmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmm...a proposed funding cut for the National Institutes of Health.

  For years the National Institutes of Health have received bipartisan support. Unless the voting public has gotten distorted beyond the point of even faint recognition, political reality dictates that no congressperson can go back to his or her home district and proudly proclaim to have cut funding for medical research into grandma’s cancer, mom’s heart disease, baby’s developmental disorders and Trump’s mental illness. The White House’s NIH cuts are likely to face stiff opposition from both parties. And it pays to remember that congress is the one who passes the budget.
  
  Yet the question remains, if both parties support the NIH, whom is Trump representing when he cuts it? Big Pharma. That’s who.

  Julianna Forlano, Crooks and Liars.
  
• Another massive case of voter fraud. That is:

  On Tuesday, Colorado prosecutors threw a wrench into that already dubious theory, accusing Curtis of voter fraud for allegedly filling out and mailing in his ex-wife’s 2016 ballot for president, Denver’s Fox affiliate reported.
  
  Curtis, 57, was charged in Weld County District Court with one count of misdemeanor voter fraud and one count of forgery, a Class 5 felony, according to local media.

  Derek Hawkins, The Washington Post, via Comrade Misfit.  Oddly, "voter fraud" seems to be largely perpetrated by Republicans.  Projection much?

Embracing the Power of 'And': Unclear on the Concept/Stupid/Liar

• Guess who wants to investigate Republican Satanic panic "voter fraud?"
• Even Mike Huckabee is side-eyeing this "investigation."
• "Evidence."  (Nearly typed "evidenza," and I know none of you would get that.)  
• Meanwhile, Tiffany Trump, Steve Bannon, and Steven Mnuchin are registered to vote in two states, which according to the embedded Tweet is also "voter fraud."  (As the article states, only voting in two states is fraud.)
• Ms. Conway says that's not true.  Records say otherwise.
• The Field Negro on the weather, veracity, and lack of same.
• ETA:
  

  Fox News host Shep Smith recapped Trump's call for a major investigation into widespread voter fraud and explained why there is no data, facts, or evidence to prove there is voter fraud at all.

  Not. Even. Fox. News.
• Oh, and four senior staff members on the State Department management team just resigned. Yes, I know it says "entire" and it was posted an hour ago.  That's still a big hit on institutional memory, according to the Washington Post article excerpted at Crooks and Liars.  (I changed the six to four because other sources reported four.)
• EFTA:  Rep. Ted Lieu:  Bring it on.
  

  "I want hearings immediately. I want to see them bring up witnesses that will validate president Trump's claims because they won't be able to find any."
  
  "This is going to show that president Trump is lying. There's really no other way to put it. He's just making stuff up. We live right now with a White House that puts out alternative facts. We have a president that lives in alternate reality. It's highly disturbing for America this is happening."

  Reported at Crooks and Liars.
• EEFTA:  It seems that Trump's source of "voter fraud" tales is, um, not exactly acquainted with the Light Side of the Force.  (The Guardian, so salt.)

  The conservative activist cited by Donald Trump as an authority on voter fraud owes the US government more than $100,000 in unpaid taxes, was once accused of lying about his qualifications, and has faced several allegations of ethical impropriety.

Rearranged because it looks better as a unified list.

"One almost gets the idea that Republicans like the "voter fraud" canard because "level playing fields" are not really to their taste."

Yes, I've just quoted myself.  And now I'm going to cite myself.  Remember when I mentioned Alabama closing DMV offices to thwart obtaining official ID (driver licenses) for voting?

Guess what?

[...]  We now know the driver's license closures saved little money -- somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000, tops, according to Bentley's former ALEA secretary Spencer Collier. The routine shortfalls in the General Fund budget typically range from $100 million to $200 million. The closures didn't even scratch that. They were a naked act of political vengeance.

[...]  In the 10 counties with the highest proportion of minorities, the state closed driver's license offices in eight. The other two remained open because it might be too much to explain, I suppose, for Alabama not to have driver's license offices in Montgomery or Selma.

Maybe the governor didn't intend to target minority citizens with the closures, but ultimately his intent is beside the point.

ETA: via twistedchick on Dreamwidth

Rampant! Voter! Fraud! and Other Stories

• Yes!  Rampant voter fraud!  My smelling salts!  My pearls!  My fainting -- wait, 4?

  We combed through the news-aggregation system Nexis to find demonstrated cases of absentee or in-person voter fraud — which is to say, examples of people getting caught casting a ballot that they shouldn't have cast — during this election. This excludes examples of voter registration fraud — the filing of fraudulent information. Those aren't votes cast — and given that organizations often provide incentives for employees to register as many people as possible, registration fraud cases (while still rare) are more common.
  
  Here's what we found: [examples]
  
  [...]
  
  There is simply no evidence that fraudulent ballots played any significant role in the 2016 presidential election whatsoever.

  That's four actual cases and three maybes. Somebody is using an eggbeater on that teapot, trying to create a tempest.
  
• Remember when we used to joke "It's a Russian plot" about seemingly-conspiratorial weirdness? It seems it's not a joke anymore.  Furthermore: 
  • Southern Beale,

    While this is the current headline, let me be blunt: this is not news. I wrote about this over the summer, here. I’m just a dumb housewife in Tennessee but even I can read a damn newspaper. When you read that the Russians hacked everyone, but only the DNC’s emails got sent to WikiLeaks, it’s pretty obvious that they were trying to help one team, and it sure wasn’t Hillary’s. As I wrote then:
    

    […] it’s far more worrisome that Putin is trying to help get Donald Trump elected than that Debbie Wasserman Schultz tried to help elect Hillary Clinton.

    But did we have that conversation? Noooo. We had to get all emo over Debbie Wasserman Schultz. That was super-fun.

    There's more.
  • Zandar

    The White House wanted to make sure everyone was on board with this, but Mitch McConnell said no, as he has for eight years. More importantly this [has] seriously thrown the legitimacy of Trump's win into doubt and Republicans like McConnell would have rather won with Russian help than a fair election.  Remember that.

    and
  • Driftglass

    Our country has been hit by a massive sneak attack by a hostile foreign power: a sneak attack whose very existence was covered up by leaders of the Republican Party.
    
    [...]
    
    The word you are looking for is "treason".

• Joining Anthony Weiner's therapy group: Jefferson Parish's president (Louisiana Republican) Mike Yenni.

  Fox 8’s Lee Zurik asked Yenni what his intent was in exchanging erotic texts with a teen.
  
  “I can’t…I really can’t answer it,” said Yenni. “I mean, it was just…it was a stupid action. It was a stupid action to even get into this form of text messaging. It was something…something that I can’t explain why I did it.”

  via skippy.
• Not the song or the musical group:  New theory about the Bermuda Triangle, with ominous music.

"Flying Fox from the Yard"

• The Daily Banter's Justin Rosario discusses national voter ID.

  It will be nigh impossible to convince Millennials who came of age during the Great Recession that corporations and the 1% are the good guys. They watched corporate greed destroy the lives of millions and watched the rich get even richer from the destruction. Republicans will also be unable to convince them that they should vote Republican because Jesus hates abortion and brown people but loves guns. The usual wedge issues will have lost their potency. Republicans know this.
  
  The only move left to them has been rigging the election through extreme gerrymandering and massive voter suppression. Now that they control the entire government, the next step is to implement Voter ID laws on a federal level, forcing even Democratically controlled states to adopt a law that will reduce the number of eligible voters by millions.

  That to me smacks a little of conspiracy theory (also, someone who thinks Baby Boomers are "reliably conservative" has not met nearly enough of them).
• Variations on the term "crony capitalism."

  The real thing the doctrinaire conservatives get upset about in these contexts certainly has nothing to do with any meanings of the word "crony" in any case. It's the questioning of the miraculous rightness of the Invisible Hand, or less metaphysically the idea that any democratically constituted authority should question the judgment of the "rationally selfish" bourgeois through whose individual decisions the Hand is believed to operate. It's the bourgeois religion, according to which whatever the bourgeois wants is right, however destructive it may seem over the short run.