The system is rigged!

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The 2016 election was the first to take place without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The results were manifold, from racially discriminatory voter ID laws, which could have swung states to Trump, to racially-motivated polling place closures, which are shown to depress turnout. A report found that in jurisdictions previously covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 868 polling places were shuttered. Previous research shows that the black share of a county’s population predicts fewer early voting sites. In North Carolina, federal judges found that Republicans worked to suppress black voters with “surgical precision.” After losing a close Senate election, New Hampshire Republicans are pushing forward with a residency bill designed to suppress young voters.

Suppression is deeply embedded in American elections, from registration barriers to felon disenfranchisement. In states like Texas, Republicans have erected huge barriers to registration drives, such as requiring individuals who want to register folks to be deputized. These barriers work: according to Census Bureau data, only 68 percent of eligible individuals are registered to vote. Registration barriers are so deep that according to Census data, even if every registered voter in Texas voted, the turnout rate (68 percent) would be lower than the current turnout rate in Minnesota (69 percent).

These registration barriers disproportionately limit the access of people of color. According to the Census Bureau, 74 percent of non-Hispanic whites are registered, compared to 69 percent of African-Americans, 56 percent of Asian-Americans and 57 percent of Latinos. Even if every registered Latino voted, the turnout rate for Latinos would be lower than for whites (63 percent in 2016). Registration is structural voter suppression, and it creates a ceiling on participation. 

The Role of Voter Suppression in the 2016 Election | Demos

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Kris Kobach likes to bill himself as “the A.C.L.U.’s worst nightmare.” The Kansas secretary of state, who was a champion debater in high school, speaks quickly for a rural Midwesterner, with the confidence of a man who holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Yale Law School, and until January he hosted his own local radio show, which used that line about the A.C.L.U. to introduce each episode. On March 3 he strode into the Robert J. Dole Federal Courthouse in Kansas City, Kan., to face the latest lawsuit filed against him by the civil-liberties organization. In an unusual arrangement for a secretary of state, Kobach, 51, personally argues all of his cases. He seems to see it as a perk of the job — and a mission.

The A.C.L.U. has filed four suits against Kobach since he was elected in 2010. All of them challenge some aspect of his signature piece of legislation, the Secure and Fair Elections Act, or SAFE Act, a 2011 state law that requires people to show a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers to register to vote. Kobach has long argued that such a law is necessary to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote, a phenomenon that he has repeatedly claimed is both pervasive and a threat to democracy. The A.C.L.U. has countered that the real purpose of the law is not to prevent fraud but to stop the existing electorate from expanding and shifting demographically. The same principle informed the “grandfather clauses” of the Jim Crow era, which exempted most white voters from literacy tests and poll taxes designed to disenfranchise black voters. Even a seemingly small impediment to registration, like a new ID requirement, favors the status quo, and in Kansas, and indeed nationally, the status quo favors the Republican Party.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed tactics that prevented blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups from voting. But for decades, Republicans have fought to circumvent the law by describing their proposed restrictions — requiring specific forms of identification to vote, preventing early voting, purging voting rolls — as colorblind security measures, even though there is little evidence of any individual voter fraud in the United States.

The A.C.L.U. has repeatedly argued that the Kansas law discriminated against minorities, young people and low-income people, all of whom are more likely to be registering for the first time and less likely to have immediate access to citizenship papers, because they can’t afford them or were more transient and don’t have copies of their documents at hand. No state has been as aggressive as Kansas in restricting ballot access, and no elected official has been as dogged as Kobach.

The Man Behind Trump’s Voter-Fraud Obsession - The New York Times

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The outpouring of bipartisan opposition shows why Trump’s sham election commission should be disbanded before it does any more damage. The commission was set up for one purpose—to spread false information about voter fraud, like Trump’s gigantic lie that millions of people voted illegally, in order to build support for policies that make it more difficult to vote. Kobach and his ilk have long advocated for suppressive policies like strict voter-ID laws, documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration and voter purges, along with weakening landmark voting-rights laws like the Voting Rights Act and National Voter Registration Act..

The Trump Administration’s Voter-Suppression Plans Are Backfiring Badly | The Nation

But we're not out of the woods, not by a long shot..

Almost immediately, states began to refuse Kobach's request; at least 14 states will not comply at all, while 44 states will provide only some of the data. Kobach, a Republican who serves as Kansas' secretary of state, even conceded that his own state could not turn over all the requested information. Some progressives celebrated the widespread bipartisan resistance to Kobach's commission as a victory against voter suppression.

But Michael McDonald, an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida, believes any celebration is premature. McDonald, who served as an expert witness in the American Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit against Kansas' proof-of-citizenship voting requirement, believes the commission is still on track to achieve its likely goal: a report that wildly exaggerates instances of fraudulent voting and urges Congress to crack down on voting rights. I spoke with McDonald about the data controversy and the commission's endgame on Thursday. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Trump's election probe could gut the National Voter Registration Act - Business Insider

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President Donald Trump plans to appoint two more members to his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, the White House announced Monday evening. Christian Adams of Virginiaand Alan Lamar King of Alabama will join the15-member commission that Trump created by executive order in May to investigate his claims of voter fraud in last year’s presidential election.

The group is expected to hold its first public meeting on July 19, according to a notice published in the Federal Register last week. Christian Adams worked at the Department of Justice in the George W. Bush administration and wrote a book titled, "Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department," and has previously claimed that illegal aliens registered to vote. He is a columnist for the conservative site PJ Media.
King is a probate judge in Alabama..

Trump adds two to election integrity commission | TheHill

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A Democrat who served on President Trump's voter fraud commission wrote in a letter to the White House this week that the findings presented by Vice President Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach were "false" and did not contain actual evidence of voter fraud. In a letter to Pence and Kobach, the chairmen of the now-shuttered voter fraud commission, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (D) wrote that when it came to evidence of widespread voter fraud, the committee's final report was "glaringly empty." Dunlap posted the commission's findings online this week after previously suing the panel to obtain them..

Trump voter fraud commission member says its claims were 'false' | TheHill

• Trump makes completely unsubstantiated claims of massive vote fraud by illegal immigrants.
  
• He instigates a commission to research.
  
• That commission says he's right, but that's completely unsubstantiated as well.
  
• No independent research has ever indicated this is anywhere near a serious problem
  
• It's a con game from right-wingers to disenfranchise the poor and minority by making it difficult to vote in the name of protecting election integrity.
  

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Brian Kemp, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Georgia who previously made a splash for pointing a gun at a teenager in a campaign ad, is running against Democratic former state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, who would be the first African-American woman governor in U.S. history, if elected. So it is more than a little suspicious that Kemp, who also happens to be the Georgia Secretary of State, is implementing a massive voter purge that just happens to have caught up tens of thousands of black voters.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that Kemp has suspended some 53,000 voter registrations in Georgia under a draconian "exact match" policy — an amount equal to about 2 percent of the total number of votes cast in the 2014 gubernatorial race. Under this rule, registrations can be placed "on hold" if the information on file does not match anything in the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration, even a typo or a dropped hyphen in a name — and Kemp's office is not sending notifications to affected voters. Only 32 percent of the population in Georgia is black — but black people make up 70 percent of those whose registrations have been flagged in the process.

Republican Official Caught Purging Tens of Thousands of Black Voters from His Own Election for Governor | Alternet

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If you're rich and powerful..

Reiter warned Brown what would happen were she to continue digging: “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department.” Brown did not heed his warning. She flung herself at the investigation and eventually persuaded Reiter to go on record. Her resulting, award-winning three-part series last November exposed a vast operation in which 80 potential victims were identified, some as young as 13 and 14 at the time of the alleged abuse. She persuaded eight to tell their stories. 

Brown also exposed a government cover-up in which Epstein got away with an exceptionally light sentence that saw him serve only 13 months in jail. She discovered that a “non-prosecution agreement” had been negotiated secretly in 2008 by the then top federal prosecutor in Miami, Alexander Acosta, that gave Epstein and his co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution. In 2017, Acosta was appointed by Donald Trump as labor secretary, a post that ironically is responsible for combating sex trafficking. The media’s handling – or mishandling – of the Epstein affair is a story of extremes.

Jeffrey Epstein: how US media – with one star exception – whitewashed the story | US news | The Guardian

And during his time in jail Epstein could walk outside and work in his office during the day, extraordinary. And then there was the immunity for his co-conspirators, and the illegality of hiding the deal from the victims.

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The Supreme Court’s Thursday morning ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause amounts to a blank check for partisan gerrymandering. Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion holds that federal courts should not have the power to declare particular maps unconstitutional, as doing so would be “unprecedented expansion of judicial power ... into one of the most intensely partisan aspects of American political life.” What this means, in practice, is that local authorities get to decide on the shape of House and state legislative districts. Parties that control statehouses will be freer to not only to cement their own hold on power, but ensure that their party will be sending more representatives to Washington as well. While Republicans and Democrats both gerrymander, there is no doubt that Republicans do it more and more shamelessly. North Carolina Rep. David Lewis, who helped draw one of the maps at issue in Rucho, was admirably honest about his motives in a 2016 statehouse speech. “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” he explained. “So I drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

Supreme Court gerrymandering case reveals a profound threat to democracy - Vox

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Republicans have tagged a coordinated attack on the voter rolls to try to assure electoral victory. Rather than celebrate the fact that more voters may want to join the 40% of us who troop loyally to the polls on all sides, Republicans repeatedly seems to be targeting those who might vote against them.

• In Wisconsin, a judge appointed by a Republican governor recently used an extreme and malicious interpretation of a Wisconsin state voting law to throw about 234,000 voters off state rolls. The decision on a case brought by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law &Liberty, to force the state elections commission to keep voting rolls up to date and drop voters within 30 days of not answering a letter of confirmation from the elections panel.
  
• In Georgia, it was the Republican Gov. Brian Kemp himself, the former secretary of state who had overseen voter operations and elections, who summarily disqualified 300,000 voters, overwhelmingly black and rural, from being able to vote. It was Kemp who used similar voter suppression techniques to defeat Stacey Adams, the former black Speaker of the House for governor. Adams has struck back with state and nationwide campaigns to foster voter registration.
  
• In Washington, Republicans stuck together to form enough opposition to kill what is called HR 4, a bill to reinstate various portions of the defunct Voters Rights Act to ensure balance in voter registration. The background here is that a decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court had held the Voters Rights Act of 1965 no longer needed because it was adjudged by a majority of the court that states had stopped much of its history of voter suppression by race.
  

There are other cases as well, in Ohio and Texas, for example, but the trend is clear. The insurance policy Republicans seek is to limit the numbers of people who might vote, particularly in a situation where the thought is that new voters, like college students at a particular campus, or immigrants, might lean Democratic in registration and voting.

How Republicans have a coordinated attack to assure an electoral victory in 2020 – Alternet.org

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RealClearPolitics recently published a news story and a column both of which made the astounding assertion that 28 million mail-in ballots went “missing” over the last four general elections. If true, it could be a major stain on the mail-ballot voting process. But it is not true. Here’s why. Both pieces used the term “missing” to describe ballots that were mailed out to voters but not cast by those voters. By this logic, all of the over 250 million votes not cast by in-person Election Day voters from 2012 to 2018 are also “missing.” Conflating voters choosing not to cast their ballot with “missing” ballots is a fundamental flaw in the argument against a voting system that is tried and true, with over a quarter of a billion votes cast nationally from mailed-out ballots since 2000.  In this time when election officials are working to allow voters to participate without putting their health in danger, it is important that this system is evaluated with facts, not misconstrued data. The simple fact is: An un-cast ballot is not a missing ballot.

There Were NOT 28 Million 'Missing' Mail-In Ballots | RealClearPolitics