Anyone who favors expanding voting rights should be relieved by Wednesday’s demise of President Trump’s so-called Election Integrity Commission. But pro-voter advocates are shortsighted if they think that the panel’s biggest threats are going to crawl back under the rock where its creepiest members and agenda came from.
Yes, there’s plenty to cheer about when white nationalists like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice-chair, and voter suppressors like the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky emerged with egg on their faces from a panel run in a secretive, conspiratorial and clownish manner. But progressives should not lose sight of the Republican right’s long-term plan to game the vote and betray democracy.
“Amid many challenges for the institutions of American democracy, this was a rousing win,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, who went on to make that very point. “No doubt, there is fallout to come… The commission has vanished, but its pernicious objectives persist. The White House has asked the Department of Homeland Security to take up the commission’s work—a dangerous and appalling idea. Earlier this morning, the president took to Twitter to renew calls for voting restrictions.”
Indeed, Kobach signaled the vote suppression cartel’s next move in comments to Politico, which noted, “The Kansas official said he expects officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and political appointees overseeing that agency to take over the commission’s work and begin efforts to match state voter rolls to federal databases of noncitizens. He insisted he was not disappointed with the president’s decision.”
“It’s the right move,” Kobach said. “It’s a shifting in tactics from having the investigation be done by a federal commission to having it be done by a federal agency. The agency has a greater ability to move quickly to get the investigation done.”
The GOP Strategy
Kobach’s bureaucratic comments refer to a strategy employed by the most fervent partisan Republicans to position red-run states to keep new registrants from voting and do mass purges of infrequent but legal voters from their rolls. In short, it draws on intentionally sloppy data-mining to creates thousands of false positives. That porous data has been used in recent cycles in Georgia to delay approving new registrations and to accelerate mass purges of legal voters. But it's not just Georgia.
In 2014, Florida’s top election official proposed using DHS’s problematic citizenship data to purge voter rolls. In response, county election supervisors rebelled and blocked it—because they still felt the sting of the 2000 election, when Secretary of State Katherine Harris used sloppy data-mining (seeking former felons who could not vote under that state's laws) to purge tens of thousands of eligible voters before that year's presidential election.
If Kobach has his way, the contours of that sordid history will repeat itself. But in the years since Harris’ mass purge in Florida, the right-wing strategy has become clear.
Republicans like Kobach pinpoint areas in election law and the process that are ambiguous, or where there’s no authoritative national data. For example, there is no federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, which these right-wingers define as someone impersonating someone else at the polls to vote more than once.
Since there’s no single federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, it becomes a useful propaganda tool for Republicans. For example, Trump's thoroughly debunked claim that millions of Democrats illegally voted more than once to deprive him of 2016’s popular vote majority. But that lie, made again by Trump’s press office when announcing the commission’s demise, resonates among Trump supporters who want to believe all Democrats are crooks. It doesn’t matter that there’s been vast documentation by academics and the press that voter fraud barely exists. In the absence of an authoritative federal accounting, it becomes an easy pretext for red states to pass laws to, as they say, police the process’ integrity.
Not surprisingly, on Thursday, Kobach spewed that line to—where else?—Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. His comments reveal just how comfortable he is with posturing, lying and playing partisan games in order to hold anything but free and fair elections.
“They [Democrats] have absolutely no interest in stopping voter fraud,” Kobach told Breitbart. “It’s truly extraordinary that one party in our system has made clear that they don’t care… Some people on the Left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”
Kobach then cited figures that also have been pedaled by the Heritage Foundation's von Spakovsky.
“The voter fraud commission has revealed: 938 convictions for voter fraud since the year 2000,” he said. “Fewer than 1 in 100 cases ends in a conviction. In Kansas, alone, there are 127 known cases of non-citizen aliens registering to vote. In 21 states, there were 8,471 cases of double voting discovered.”
Beyond the fact that some of these numbers—such as the Kansas figures—have been debunked, what’s missing in this hyperbole is the larger number, the denominator: that is, how many people voted legally in all the years cited? In other words, how pervasive is this problem? What is its real magnitude in the real world of voting?
The answer is that well over half a billion people have voted in federal elections alone since 2000, which means the 938 figure is close to a once-in-a-million occurrence. Nonetheless, the absence of an authoritative federal agency tracking this issue perpetuates Kobach’s propaganda and continues to serve as a pretext to overly police voting—as Trump’s Thursday tweets affirmed.
ICE to Vet New Voters?
That voter fraud backdrop takes us to what’s new and insidious, which is Kobach’s comments that the Department of Homeland Security can take over the commission’s work to prevent “non-citizen aliens” from voting. Just like voter fraud, there is no authoritative federal database—even at DHS—listing every American citizen.
That creates a handy ambiguity, which right-wingers like Kobach, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner have sought to exploit—and have exploited—to game the GOP’s chances of winning. Because DHS’s citizenship database is incomplete, it cannot confirm the citizenship of every person registering to vote. That omission was exploited by Kemp to delay processing tens of thousands of new voters in 2014.
When Detzner tried to force Florida county election offices to use DHS’s citizenship data to purge voter rolls—initially claiming, like Kobach, that there were hundreds of thousands of illegal voters—local officials called him out and forced him to back down. Later, it was revealed that there were fewer than 100 questionable registrants in a state with more than 10 million registered voters.
Why would Republicans focus on proof of citizenship in order to vote? Because, as the Brennan Center reported in 2006 and updated in a report last summer, an estimated 7 percent of eligible voters don’t have such documentation, typically a birth certificate or passport. In other words, adding proof of citizenship to register will reduce participation in elections. (Think of it as a barrier at the starting line of the process, just as stricter state voter ID requirements is a barrier at the finish line.)
Bad Data as a Partisan Tool
And if Kobach is successful at screening existing voter rolls with incomplete federal data, it creates the easily seen prospect of red-run states doing pre-emptive voter roll purges, in which inactive voters, especially in blue epicenters, can be disproportionately purged or removed from voting in the next election without reregistering.
That’s not a paranoid scenario. The Supreme Court will later this month hear a case over that very issue from Ohio, where GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted took advantage of two contradictory sentences in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to purge tens of thousands of mostly Democratic voters from his state’s three biggest cities. Reuters' reporters analyzed the purge and found it was mostly aimed at Democrats. Here again, the GOP saw and seized on a legal ambiguity and bad data to rig the process.
The reason Kobach and Trump’s commission was so bent on adding a new proof of citizenship standard is it benefits the GOP in many ways. First, as the Brennan Center noted, 7 percent of otherwise eligible voters don’t have the paper documentation. Beyond that, knowingly turning to sloppy data-mining to additionally delay new registrants further helps the GOP by thwarting grassroots registration drives. And using bad data to imprecisely target infrequent voters for purges also plays in their favor.
“A nationwide survey by the Brennan Center in November 2006 found that 7 percent of the citizen voting age population, or 13 million people, did not possess documents that would prove their citizenship,” the Center’s July 2017 report said. “The rate is twice as high among citizens earning less than $25,000 per year. Women who changed their name upon getting married are especially likely to lack the relevant documents: A third of voting-age women don’t have proof of citizenship that reflects their current name.”
The Voting Wars Continue
Yes, it’s a good thing that media scrutiny and public criticism of Trump’s election commission shut down that sham panel. But it was only one means to an end that is still in the GOP’s sights. Indeed, just this week it was revealed that the Justice Department asked the U.S. Census to include a question on citizenship, citing a need to use that information to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
Kobach and his ilk will do anything to subvert the process of voting, starting with erecting barriers for Democrats and non-whites. They’ve burrowed into the nooks and crannies of the law and voting process to exploit ambiguities and contradictions. Just watch what they will try to do in the months ahead—not just with hyperbolic voter fraud accusation, but screening for citizenship. When they wrap themselves in the flag, look at their data-mining. They know it’s shoddy and going to yield huge numbers of false positives, and that’s just what they want.
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