Resist, Elections Officers, Resist!

Have a little attempted voter suppression with your lunch.

Kobach asked the Connecticut secretary of state’s office to provide the commission with all publicly available voter roll data, including the full names of all registered voters along with their addresses, dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, voting history and other personal information. Kobach said in a phone call that he sent similar letters to election officials in every state and that as Kansas’ top election official he will be providing the commission with all of the information for Kansas voters.

[snip]

“If Barack Obama tried to get all of this information from state election officials it would be front page news on Fox News for months and would prompt a congressional investigation of federal takeover of state election processes,” [Rick] Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, said.

Put aside the fact that Kris Kobach is a firm believer that Democrats should not be allowed to vote in any elections in the United States. What’s really annoying is that despite his ridiculously poor track record Republicans think he’s their demographic savior who’ll keep all those immigrants and brown and black people from voting for people they shouldn’t. Examples:

Kobach has been sued four times by the ACLU for his efforts to prevent people from voting, and lost all four cases. After months of aggressive investigation, he has found nine cases of fraudulent voting in the state out of 1.8 million votes cast. The Kansas City Star recently called him “the Javert of voter fraud.” Recently, when Michael Wines of The New York Times surveyed all 50 chief election officials as to whether there were significant levels of voter fraud in their states, 49 of them said there was not; Kobach refused to respond.

For Kobach, voter fraud is the Great White Whale.

Multiple states have already refused to comply with Kobach’s request, and I expect more will (you can track them on this Google Docs spreadsheet). Good. They should not cooperate with him. The demons of voter fraud exist only in Trump’s and Kobach’s heads, but in Kobach’s case fraud is an excuse. He wants to validate purging as many Democratic voters as he can from every voting roll he can get his hands on.

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