Tag: Voting

What’s In It for Andy?

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New York Governor Andrew “Rat Faced Andy” Cuomo just signed a bill making it easier for voters to register for primary voting:

A bill meant to make it easier for voters to change party enrollment ahead of a primary election was approved Thursday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The measure addresses a long-standing complaint of good-government organization and voter-rights’ groups that New York’s election laws make it difficult to access party primaries, which are closed to those enrolled in a party.

The law signed Thursday will end the Oct. 11 deadline and allow voters to register by Feb. 14 to make changes to party enrollment. New York’s presidential primary is scheduled for April 28.

“While the federal administration continues to look for new ways to disenfranchise voters across the country, in New York we are making monumental changes to break down more barriers to the ballot box and encourage more people to exercise this fundamental right,” Cuomo said.

Call me a cynic, but I am wondering what Cuomo’s angle might be.

He doesn’t do good unless there is something in it for him.

Still, the voters of New York will benefit from this.

Not Just Republican States

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The Bernie Sanders camp is urging the DNC Rules & Bylaws committee to consider sanctions against NY if Gov. Cuomo doesn’t sign a bill sitting on his desk that would make it easier to switch parties to vote in a primary, as recommended by the party’s Unity & Reform Commission. pic.twitter.com/1mEZmukFNB

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) September 19, 2019

New York state has the most byzantine and opaque requirements for party registration in the nation.

This has clearly been done to ensure that the party bosses have no accountability.

BTW, it’s not just the Sanders campaign that has made this observation, so has the Brennan Center:

Clumsily designed ballots. An antiquated registration process. Confusing deadlines and outdated laws. Long lines and no early voting. New York state — caricatured as a bastion of progressive politics — has some of the most retrograde voting laws and practices in the nation. Reports of dysfunction from Thursday’s primary only add to the evidence: New York is disenfranchising its citizens.

We won’t see any sanctions, but we should.

Nice to See Reality Acknowledged in a Court of Law

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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has just ruled thatwas written specifically to prevent blacks from voting.

If this stands, it might put North Carolina back under the pre-clearance regime of the Voting Rights Act:

Today, a federal court struck down North Carolina’s voter-ID law, one of the strictest in the nation. In addition to requiring residents to show identification before they can cast a ballot, the law also eliminated same-day voter registration, eliminated seven days of early voting and put an end to out-of-precinct voting. The federal court ruling reinstates these provisions, for now.

………

The federal court in Richmond found that the primary purpose of North Carolina’s wasn’t to stop voter fraud, but rather to disenfranchise minority voters. The judges found that the provisions “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

In particular, the court found that North Carolina lawmakers requested data on racial differences in voting behaviors in the state. “This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID, those issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV),” the judges wrote.

So the legislators made it so that the only acceptable forms of voter identification were the ones disproportionately used by white people. “With race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans,” the judges wrote. “The bill retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess.”

The data also showed that black voters were more likely to make use of early voting — particularly the first seven days out of North Carolina’s 17-day voting period. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting. “After receipt of this racial data, the General Assembly amended the bill to eliminate the first week of early voting, shortening the total early voting period from seventeen to ten days,” the court found.

Most strikingly, the judges point to a “smoking gun” in North Carolina’s justification for the law, proving discriminatory intent. The state argued in court that “counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic,” and said it did away with Sunday voting as a result.

“Thus, in what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race — specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise,” the judges write in their decision.

This is about as clear-cut an indictment of the discriminatory underpinnings of voter-ID laws as you’ll find anywhere. Studies have already shown a significant link between support for voter ID and racial discrimination, among both lawmakers and white voters in general.

“Faced with this record,” the federal court concludes, “we can only conclude that the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the challenged provisions of the law with discriminatory intent.”

I really hope that this is enough to get North Carolina back under the Voting Rights Act.

Woo Hoo!

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The North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that the states hyper-partisan redistricting violates the state constitution.

Even if the US Supreme Court has punted on this, it appears that state courts are increasingly ruling against the practice:

A North Carolina court ruled Tuesday that the state’s legislative districts are unconstitutional, in a unanimous decision that won praise from voting-rights advocates and opens a new front in the national battle over partisan gerrymanders.

The three superior court judges in Wake County set a deadline of Sept. 17 by which North Carolina’s Republican-led General Assembly must submit redrawn state House and Senate district maps to be reviewed by a court-appointed referee.

In their ruling, the judges stated that the plaintiffs had proved the effect of the “partisan” maps drawn by the state legislature was that, “in all but the most unusual election scenarios, the Republican party will control a majority of both chambers of the General Assembly.”

“In other words, the Court finds that in many election environments, it is the carefully crafted maps, and not the will of the voters, that dictate the election outcomes in a significant number of legislative districts and, ultimately, the majority control of the General Assembly,” the judges said in their ruling.

2 down, 48 to go.

Of Course He Did

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott, despite his protestations, was the driving force behind the state’s voter purge:

Two top officials at the Department of Public Safety named Gov. Greg Abbott’s office as a driving force in the state’s program to purge nearly 100,000 suspected non-U.S. citizens from Texas’ voter rolls, emails made public Tuesday show.

Abbott’s office, however, on Tuesday denied it had any contact with the agency before the launch of the effort in late January.

The voter purge was scrapped in April after the state settled lawsuits challenging it, and after Secretary of State officials publicly admitted that tens of thousands of naturalized citizens had been wrongly flagged for removal from voter rolls.

The emails were made public Tuesday by the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center, which represented plaintiffs who sued the state.

In an August 2018 email, John Crawford, a top official of the driver license division at the Texas Department of Public Safety, told employees that DPS had previously turned over records to compare with state voter rolls, and “we have an urgent request from the governor’s office to do it again.”

That same day, the director of the driver license division, Amanda Arriaga, wrote in a separate email that “the Governor is interested in getting this information as soon as possible.”

………

The emails released Tuesday, however, suggest that those DPS officials were responding to pressure that Abbott’s office applied, said Luis Vera, LULAC’s national general counsel.

“The bottom line is this was the governor’s program,” Vera said. “He threw Whitley and the DPS secretary under the bus. All along it was the governor pushing for (the program.)”

As if it would be anyone else.

Bye David

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David Whitley, the now former Secretary of Stat of Texas, has resigned following a botched attempt to disenfranchise about 100,000 Hispanic Texans:

Texas’s acting secretary of state, David Whitley (R), resigned Monday just months after leading the botched voter purge of nearly 100,000 suspected noncitizens that erroneously also targeted U.S. citizens, efforts that drew rebukes from a federal judge and numerous voter rights groups.

Whitley’s departure came as the Texas Senate failed to confirm him to the position by a two-thirds majority on the last day of the legislative session. He submitted his resignation letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) “effective immediately” just before the final gavel, as reported by the Austin American-Statesman. Abbott accepted his resignation shortly afterward, praising his “moral character and integrity.”

What Greg Abbot means when he says, “Moral character and integrity,” is, “This guy is trying to keep n*****s from voting, and I approve.”

Whitley, a gubernatorial appointee and former aide to Abbott, spent less than six months overseeing Texas elections. He will leave office best known for the disastrous elections-integrity operation that wrongly identified thousands of naturalized citizens as suspected noncitizens illegally registered to vote.

He revealed the investigation in January, causing unsupported fears of rampant voter fraud while emboldening Republican politicians who had made similar voter fraud claims — including President Trump. Whitley’s office had claimed that, of 95,000 suspected noncitizens, 58,000 had voted in at least one Texas election over the last 18 years. Letters sent to all those suspected noncitizens threatened to disenfranchise them unless they proved their citizenship within 30 days.

The numbers on this, “A federal judge ordered Whitley to stop his voter purge of noncitizens after it turned out only about 80 on his original list had actually been ineligible to vote.”

I am sure that Greg Abbot will find someone even worse.

Florida: No Voting, Because, F%$# You

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The Florida legislature has passed, and the governor is certain to sign, a bill prohibiting the ex-cons recently given the right to vote from actually casting a ballot.

The bill says that they have to make full restitution for all fines and court costs, but the judiciary is so screwed up in the state, much like everything else in that Gid-forsaken sh%$ hole, that most of the now freed prisoners will have no way of knowing if they continue to owe money to the courts:

In November, Florida voters approved a groundbreaking ballot measure that would restore voting rights for up to 1.5 million people with felony convictions. But the Republican-led Legislature voted on Friday to impose a series of sharp restrictions that could prevent tens of thousands of them from ever reaching the ballot box.

In a move that critics say undermines the spirit of what voters intended, thousands of people with serious criminal histories will be required to fully pay back fines and fees to the courts before they could vote. The new limits would require potential new voters to settle what may be tens of thousands of dollars in financial obligations to the courts, effectively pricing some people out of the ballot box.

“Basically, they’re telling you, ‘If you have money, you can vote. If you don’t have money, you can’t,’” said Patrick Penn, 42, who spent 15 years in prison for strong-arm robbery and a violent burglary. He said he does not know whether he owes money to the court, but worries it could now prove a complication when he gets ready to cast a ballot. “That’s not what the people voted for.”

With the House voting 67-42 along party lines on Friday to endorse the new restrictions, the legislation goes next to Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had called on the Legislature to set additional standards for registering ex-felons to vote.

The vast majority of criminal defendants are poor when they are arrested and even poorer after they are released from prison.

The new restrictions have been attacked by civil rights groups and some of the initiative’s backers as an exercise in Republican power politics, driven by fears that people with felony convictions are mostly liberals who could reshape the electorate ahead of presidential elections in 2020 and beyond. Republicans have dominated Florida’s state government for more than two decades, but elections are often decided by a fraction of a percentage point.

It’s a poll tax, and hopefully the courts will invalidate it, at least until the Supreme Court enforces, in a 5-4 decision the constitutional principle that n*****s don’t get to vote.

To quote JFK,* “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

*For once, I am not quoting “Not really Tallyrand, but attributed to him.”

Also, I Did Not Expect This

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A federal judge has ordered Texas election officials to halt a planned purge of electoral rolls, calling their effort “ham-handed” and “threatening” and saying there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state.

The Wednesday ruling, a relief for voting rights activists, puts a temporary stop to the secretary of state’s search for noncitizens who may have voted illegally — a probe that proved deeply flawed just days after it began.

In late January, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley made the startling announcement that nearly 60,000 noncitizens over two decades may have voted in state elections. In response to this finding, Whitley said, counties must conduct “list maintenance activity,” a bureaucratic euphemism for canceling the registrations of fraud suspects.

Whitley’s statement galvanized lawmakers — nearly all Republicans — who claim that tens of thousands of noncitizens are committing large-scale voter fraud. Even President Trump weighed in.

But there was a catch: As U.S. District Judge Fred Biery said this week, the secretary of state’s numbers were wrong.

“It appears this is a solution looking for a problem,” Biery wrote in his ruling, saying the policy “exemplifies the power of government to strike fear and anxiety and to intimidate the least powerful among us.”

The government striking, “fear and anxiety [] to intimidate the least powerful among us,” was the intended goal.

Preventing non-whites from voting is a core electoral strategy of the Republican Party these days.

Needless to say, I expect the Supreme Court to overturn this, because 5 of the justices are partisan hacks.

Election Results

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In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is now ½% up over Republican Martha McSally:

Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema opened up a lead Saturday night over Republican rival Martha McSally in the U.S. Senate race in Arizona as officials count mail-in ballots, raising the prospects of Democrats winning a long-held GOP seat.

 Sinema now leads McSally 49.51 percent to 48.15 percent, according to results provided by election officials at 7 p.m. Eastern time Saturday. The two congresswomen were separated by 28,673 ballots cast statewide, with a Green Party candidate lagging far behind. More than 2.1 million votes were cast.

 The contest is to replace retiring Sen. Jeff Flake, one of the more outspoken Republican critics of President Trump.

 Without any evidence, President Trump suggested foul play in the Arizona vote count in a tweet on Friday: “Just out — in Arizona, SIGNATURES DON’T MATCH. Electoral corruption — Call for a new Election? We must protect our Democracy!” the president tweeted.

 In response, Flake tweeted: “There is no evidence of ‘electoral corruption’ in Arizona, Mr. President. Thousands of dedicated Arizonans work in a non-partisan fashion every election cycle to ensure that every vote is counted. We appreciate their service.”

It’s still not certain, Arizona has a large proportion of vote by mail ballots, but it looks promising, though Sinema has recently been very Blue Dog, so she is the definition of winning poorly.

And then there is Florida, where both the Governor’s race and the Senate race (and Ag Commissioner) are heading to a recount.

It’s always Florida, isn’t it?

Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner has formally ordered a machine recount in three statewide races: U.S. Senate, Governor and Agriculture Commissioner.

“I hereby order the canvassing boards responsible for canvassing [the three races] to conduct a machine recount of the votes cast in the race,” reads an order from Detzner sent to elections supervisors in all 67 Florida counties. Separate orders were sent for each race subject to a recount.

The Secretary of State’s office also sent procedures to be followed for the machine recount.

Totals as of 12:30 on Saturday shows Republican Senate candidate Rick Scott leading incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson by 12,562, Republican Gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis beating Democrat Andrew Gillum by 33,684 votes, and Democratic Agriculture Commissioner candidate Nikki Fried ahead of Republican Matt Caldwell by 5,326 votes.

All three races fall within the 0.5 percent margin to trigger a statewide recount.

For now, only a machine recount has been orders and that remains the focus of elections officials.

Once again, I do find it odd that every time we examine elections in the Sunshine State, EVERY error cuts in favor of the Republicans.

Interesting how that works, huh?

A Good First Step

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A federal judge intends to issue an injunction barring Georgia election officials from tossing certain absentee ballots without giving would-be voters advance notice and a chance to rectify any issues.

The implementation of the injunction — which U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May plans to file Thursday — could complicate the work of election officials statewide, requiring the review of hundreds or thousands of ballot signatures with less than two weeks until Election Day. But civil rights groups whose lawsuits led to May’s decision have already declared victory in the battle, just one of many voting rights skirmishes to surface in what’s become a contentious Georgia election season.

“We are pleased that the court has enforced the due process guarantees of the U.S. Constitution,” said Sean Young, legal director of Georgia’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Today’s ruling is a victory for democracy and for every absentee voter in the state of Georgia.”

This is not the sort of sh%$ that should be allowed to stand.

It is literally an assault on democracy.

I Approve of this Flag Burning

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Burning this flag is a good thing

Democratic candidate for Georgia governor Stacy Abrams, participated in a burning of the Georgia flag in 1992 because of its extremely prominent placement of the racist confederate flag:

Just 30 or so people attended the 1992 protest on the steps of Georgia’s State Capitol — a smattering of student activists but mostly reporters and a few Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents, snapping photos of demonstrators lighting a state flag on fire.

In the center of an Atlanta Journal-Constitution photo chronicling the event was a Spelman College freshman named Stacey Abrams, who, 26 years later, finds herself locked in a race that could make her the nation’s first black female governor — and who is unapologetic about her role in the demonstration.

In a statement Tuesday, Abrams’s campaign said she was part of a movement to remove the Confederate emblem from the Georgia flag.

“During Stacey Abrams’ college years, Georgia was at a crossroads, struggling with how to overcome racially divisive issues, including symbols of the confederacy, the sharpest of which was the inclusion of the confederate emblem in the Georgia state flag,” her campaign said in a statement about the photo, which resurfaced Monday. “Stacey was involved with a permitted, peaceful protest against the confederate emblem in the flag. This conversation was sweeping across Georgia as numerous organizations, prominent leaders, and students engaged in the ultimately successful effort to change the flag.”

Good.  Embrace this.  You were right then, and you are right now.


It got caught on tape

She still has a tough row to hoe to win, she’s black, she’s a woman, she’s unabashedly progressive, it’s Georgia, and her opponent is the Georgia Secretary of State and has been recorded saying that he wants to suppress the vote:

Brian Kemp, Georgia Secretary of State and the Republican nominee for Georgia governor, expressed at a ticketed campaign event that his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams’ voter turnout operation “continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote,” according to audio obtained by Rolling Stone.

 An attendee of the “Georgia Professionals for Kemp” event says they recorded 21 minutes and 12 seconds of the evening, held last Friday at the Blind Pig Parlour Bar near Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. As proof of their attendance, the source shared with Rolling Stone a receipt of their donation, which granted access to the gathering.

 Not long after Kemp began his remarks, the candidate expressed worry about early voting and “the literally tens of millions of dollars that they [the Abrams camp] are putting behind the get-out-the-vote effort to their base.”

 Kemp then asserted that much of that Abrams effort is focused on absentee ballot requests. “They have just an unprecedented number of that,” he said, “which is something that continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote — which they absolutely can — and mail those ballots in, we gotta have heavy turnout to offset that.”

 ………

 It is fairly typical for a political candidate expressing confidence in his campaign to lament his opponent’s efforts to increase turnout. But Kemp’s position as Georgia’s Secretary of State clouds his statements. While it is not uncommon for someone in such a position to be on a ballot during an election that he or she oversees — they do have to run for re-election, after all — the state’s top elections official speaking of “concern” about increased early and absentee voting raises further questions about a conflict of interest.

Kemp’s recent decision to suspend more than 53,000 voter applications, 70 percent of which were filed by black residents, for violating the state’s “exact match” verification standard has drawn attention to his penchant for restrictive voter laws and purging of voter rolls. American Public Media reported last week that Kemp purged an estimated 107,000 voters last year simply because they didn’t vote in the prior election. He is also being sued for leaving more than 6 million Georgia voting records open to hacking.

………

 Reached for comment, Abigail Collazo, Director of Strategic Communications for the Abrams campaign, said, “Brian Kemp is barely trying to hide the shameful fact that his strategy is to win through voter suppression. The idea that he, as Secretary of State, would be ‘concerned’ that hardworking Georgians are exercising their right to vote is disgraceful and outrageous.”

If there is any justice in the world, Brian Kemp will spend the rest of his life in prison for this, but Republicans approve of him, and Democrats lack the guts to go after rat f%$#s like him, so he’ll die surrounded by his loved one, as opposed to being shanked in a prison laundry, which is what he deserves.

How Convenient

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In Georgia, Brian Kemp is the Secretary of State. He’s also running for governor.

As Secretary of state, he has purged a tenth of voters, with blacks purged at a rate twice that of white voters.

As Marcus Tullius Cicero was wont to say, “Cui bono” (Who benefits):

My lawyer had to threaten Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp with a federal lawsuit to force him to turn over the names of over half a million voters whose citizenship rights he quietly extinguished.

This past week, I released the name of every one of these Georgia voters Kemp flushed from voter rolls in 2017. If you’re a Georgia resident, check the list. If your name is on it, re-register right now. You only have through tomorrow (October 9).

It’s no coincidence that Georgia’s Purge’n General is also running for Governor: The Republican candidate is fighting a dead-even race against Stacey Abrams, Democratic House Minority Leader. Abrams, if she wins, would become the first Black woman governor in US history.

Suspiciously, Kemp sent no notice to these citizens after he took away their voting rights. If they show up to vote on November 6, they’re out of luck — and so is Georgia’s democracy.

Palast (above) neglects to mention that it is minority voters who are being disproportionately effected by his actions:

An analysis of the records obtained by The Associated Press reveals racial disparity in the process. Georgia’s population is approximately 32 percent black, according to the U.S. Census, but the list of voter registrations on hold with Kemp’s office is nearly 70 percent black.

An important thing to note here:  Despite public chest beating, the national Democratic party does not spend a whole bunch of time or money on getting voters registered.

It should be 24/7 thing, but it isn’t.

OK, this is Evil, Even by the Standards of ICE

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Among other things, this might have the effect of revealing actual votes in early voting and absentee ballots:

Immigration authorities want North Carolina elections officials to turn over nearly a decade’s worth of voting records by the end of the month.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina subpoenaed records Friday from the state board of elections and 44 county elections boards in the eastern part of the state. A meeting notice from the board says the subpoena came at the request of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Among the state records from Jan. 1, 2010 through Aug. 30, 2018 that were requested: all voter registration applications, federal write-in absentee ballots, federal post card applications, early-voting application forms, provisional voting forms, absentee ballot request forms, all “admission or denial of non-citizen return forms,” and all voter registration cancellation or revocation forms.

………

Wake County, one of the 44 counties in the Eastern District’s jurisdiction, received its subpoena Friday via fax. Documents requested from the county are: “Any and all poll books, e-poll books, voting records, and/or voter authorization documents, and executed official ballots (including absentee official ballots), that were submitted to, filed by, received by, and/or maintained by the Wake County Board of Elections from August 30, 2013 through August 30, 2018.”

The state board said the request for “executed official ballots” for the 44 counties includes more than 2.2 million ballots that are traceable to the voters who cast them. These are ballots that were cast by mail or at early voting, according to the board. Those ballots have an identifying number on them. The request includes more than 3.3 million ballots that cannot be traced to individuals who voted on Election Day.

………

Gary Sims, the director of Wake County’s board of elections, said his staff has not begun to gather the data requested nor has it responded to the subpoena. The state and counties must appear in court with the documents in Wilmington on Sept. 25 at 8 a.m.

They are asking for 5 years of voting records, including ballots that can be tied to individual voters.

This is wrong on so many levels, it boggles the mind.

While there has been no public comment from the US Attorney, the nature of this court order clearly implies this is being driven by electoral, and not immigration, considerations.

This stinks to high heaven.

North Carolina Just Got Interesting

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The appeals court has ruled that the Congressional districts in North Carolina are unconstitutional, and they may demand that the districts be redrawn before the election.

That’s 10 weeks:

A panel of three federal judges again declared North Carolina’s congressional district map to be unconstitutional, ruling on Monday that it was gerrymandered to unfairly favor Republican candidates.

The decision, which may have significant implications for control of Congress after the midterm elections, is likely to be appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which for the moment is evenly split on ideological lines without a ninth justice to tip the balance.

Though North Carolina’s voters tend to divide about evenly between the two parties, Republicans currently hold 10 of the state’s 13 House seats. A redrawn district map may put more of the seats within Democrats’ reach.

The three judges had ruled unanimously in January that the state’s House map violated the First and 14th Amendments by unfairly giving one group of voters — Republicans — a bigger voice than others in choosing representatives.

But the Supreme Court declined in June to hear an appeal in the case, sending it back for reconsideration under guidelines it had set out in a different case about who had legal standing to challenge the map.

In a lengthy ruling on Monday, the panel reached largely the same conclusion that it had in January. And the judges agreed that the plaintiffs in the case — voting-rights advocacy groups and residents of each of North Carolina’s 13 districts — had standing to bring the suit.

The judges left open the possibility that they could order new maps to be drawn before the 2018 election, either by the North Carolina General Assembly or by a special master appointed by the court.

Pass the popcorn.

About F%$#ing Time

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A bill has been submitted in the Senate to require paper ballots and routine audits.

Seriously, this is OpSec 101: If you are worried about people hacking your computers, use pencil and paper:

The Russians can’t hack paper.

On Tuesday, nine Senators introduced a bill that would require state and local governments to use paper ballots in an effort to secure elections from hackers. The bill would also require rigorous audits for all federal elections to ensure that results match the votes.

………

The Protecting American Votes and Elections Act of 2018 was drafted amid intense scrutiny of voting systems ahead of the mid-term elections in November. Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has elevated concern over the security of the country’s voting systems.

The senators said rigorous audits will ensure votes are legitimate. Currently, 22 states don’t require post-election audits, according to the release.

Using paper ballots will also save money, even when the costs of manpower to tally the votes is included, Wyden’s office said. “We believe paper ballots would be significantly less expensive than purchasing new insecure voting machines,” Wyden’s office said in an email.

All the bills sponsors are Democrats, probably because there are fewer opportunities for politically connected donors to get a sweetheart deal for a simple print job.

Kobach Blinks

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After a minor uproar, after Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach announcing that he would preside over his own recount, he has reversed himself:

Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach of Kansas, clinging to the slimmest of leads in the Republican primary for governor, said Thursday night that he planned to recuse himself from the vote-counting process. Earlier in the evening, his opponent, Gov. Jeff Colyer, said that some local election officials had been provided incorrect information by Mr. Kobach that could suppress votes.

“I’ll be happy to recuse myself,” Mr. Kobach, who oversees the state’s elections, said in an interview with CNN. Mr. Kobach, who has the endorsement of President Trump and has built a national reputation for warning of widespread vote fraud, suggested that his role in the Kansas count had been mostly symbolic anyway.

The governor’s fiery recusal request, and Mr. Kobach’s pledge to comply, came after the nationally watched primary left the candidates separated by only 191 votes entering Thursday.

In a letter, Mr. Colyer said some clerks had been provided incorrect information about which ballots to count, and he urged Mr. Kobach to appoint the state attorney general to handle future questions from local election workers.

 “It has come to my attention that your office is giving advice to county election officials — as recently as a conference call yesterday — and you are making public statements on national television which are inconsistent with Kansas law and may serve to suppress the vote in the ongoing Kansas primary election process,” Mr. Colyer wrote.

Yeah.  Classic Kobach.

He has made a carreer out of invalidating votes that he does not like.

The only difference this time is that he is disenfranchising white Republicans, not black and Hispanic Democrats.

When this is all over, there really needs to be a serious investigation of his behavior, because Kobach is crooked as hell.

This is Not a Surprise

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One of the members of Trump’s voter fraud panel, one who had to sue to get the internal documents of their deliberations, has now gone public, and revealed just how much of clown show the Kris Kobach voter fraud commission was:

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.

Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state — after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work, which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel.

………

Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”

………

“After reading this,” Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.”

It was clear from day 1 that the goal of the commission was to perpetrate a fraud on the American public, but it was even worse than it appeared then.