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Attacking American Democracy

President Trump announced his appointment of an “Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” to examine allegations of improper voting and fraudulent voter registration in states and across the nation. Vice President Pence will chair the “bi-partisan” panel and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach will be vice-chair.

By appointing Kobach, Trump has already identified his intent. Kobach launched a program called Interstate Crosscheck to compare voter registration data across states and ferret out evidence of double voting using an arbitrary technique in which he identified persons with identical names registered in different states and, assuming they were the same person, urged the red state secretaries of state to knock them off the voter registration list. In doing so, however, he selected names common to the African-American community (Jefferson, Washington), the Hispanic community (Pallares, Valdez), or the Asian community (Nguyen, Wong) which resulted in over a million voters stricken from the voting roles. It is no coincidence that these ethnic groups vote overwhelmingly for Democrats and that by preventing them from voting was not only the result but the intention (Kobach hasn’t commented on the fact that Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon were both registered in two states but were not removed from the voting roles).

Much like other Trump executive orders, this one is a sham. Since 2000 there have been over 300 million votes cast in the U.S. with fewer than 100 persons convicted of voter fraud and the only one convicted in Iowa in the 2016 election was a white woman who voted for Trump.

The Trump administration seems to be imposing an autocratic agenda in which firing of those who get in his way (Yates/Comey) with little regard for the well-being of Americans while enriching himself and other Oligarchs (Trumpcare) and now seeking to prevent minorities from voting. Shameful!

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