And yet that’s exactly what they’re doing - by loading the team with those who have engaged in voter suppression and who used this exact kind of information to do so, by taking false matches as evidence of voter fraud. We can’t give these guys the benefits of the doubt because they’re being incredibly transparent in their intent by following a pattern of behavior. And yes - they’re known for being incredibly stupid, too. Although this public announcement isn’t entirely stupid because a large part of it is playing to their base - people already convinced there’s voter fraud. So when they do simple name comparisons, create huge numbers of false positive matches and then present that as evidence of voter fraud on a national level (as Kobach as stupidly done on a state level), their base will go along with it.
For instance, the Kansas system has 200 false positives for every single instance of repeated voter information - and repeated registrations are mostly clerical errors of no significance to begin with.
“Obscenely”… yes, as far as how he has maintained his wealth. (I wonder what the Russian word is for “obscenely”.)
How is it undermining the secret ballot system?
Yes, that would be but I know of no states which outright refused.
They published the names of the people who complained. They demanded States turn over their voter rolls with identifying information. My four year old nephew could do the math. If you refuse to see the implications, you don’t want to.
Publishing the names of those who complained is a bad move. There was no demand that states turn over their voter rolls as I can see. There was a request that states provide publicly available information. Please explain how this letter is a demand.
For 240 years these United States have maintained the freedom of the people to cast ballots without their choices being known to the politicians they elect or their fellow citizens. Now Kobach, as an agent of the Federal government led by a populist notoriously obsessed with the loyalty of his subordinates, has unprecedentedly “requested” those States to turn over that information. Some of the States capitulated, many refused or refused to turn over all the information. The citizens who petitioned the administration, some politely and some angrily, to cease this McCarthyist power grab were doxxed, not by some rando on 4chan or Twitter, but by their own elected leaders. If the mafia walks into a business and starts breaking things until the owners ante up, it’s not a request. Even asking for this information was wrong and in a saner era would have been struck down as a violation of the 10th Amendment. Punishing citizens that protest it takes it from merely wrong to a clear and present threat to our democracy.
You’ve already got your response in Cory’s write-up. He quotes one of the people responding to Kris Kobach’s commission:
“DO NOT RELEASE ANY OF MY VOTER DATA PERIOD,” wrote one voter whose name and email address was published by the White House.And another:
“I removed my name from voter rolls. And I'm a Republican!” wrote one voter whose name was published by the White House.A government commission's aggregation of voters' names, dates of birth, addresses, and partial Social Security numbers into one big database is going to make a fair number of people who are concerned about their privacy not want to sign up to vote. That in itself sounds like voter suppression to me.
And, as Kris Kobach said on NPR’s Morning Edition, he intends for the government to use the information to determine if there’s evidence of voter fraud – which implies there would be some sort of consequences he would recommend if his commission somehow determined there was such evidence. Which, in turn, implies that he could use his commission’s findings to suppress voting.
I remember reading that one of Kobach’s examples of “voter fraud,” where supposedly a dead person was having votes cast in their name, turned out to be his son, who had the same first name, voting. Lousy record comparisons generate a lot of false positives by design, in this case.
[quote=Easily Googled References on this Topic]Maryland: “The assistant attorneys general representing SBE have considered the request and have determined the disclosure is prohibited by law,” Attorney General Brian Frosh said in a tweet Monday, adding in a second tweet, “I find this request repugnant; appears designed only 2 intimidate voters and 2 indulge the President’s fantasy that he won the popular vote.”[/quote]In other words, I don’t believe you. As far as I know 14 states have outright refused to co-operate, and most others have refused to aid the comission in any way and the commission will have to go out and purchase the data like any other group looking for the public data. It’s a nearly universally opposed action that asks for information that no state has available on public records hoping that they could get more than they legally could ask for directly.
America, your frog soup is reaching the boil.
seriously-fuck-that-guy.html
"How can you be so obtuse?"
Yup. There’s so much incompetence around that you can easily disguise malice in its forest, and thus make it plausibly indistinguishable.
Even with Nixon, there’s a question as to how much the “madman theory” was a deliberate strategy, and how much was a post-facto justification for his frequent alcoholic binges.
Exactly. Once you need to introduce the concept of face-saving, the utility of the situational ambiguity reaches apotheosis.
“Throw them to the chans alt-right cyber-bullies!”
I suspect we have only begun to plumb the depths of our indifference, that said this administration will still be the end of the Republican party.
