As we all know, Donald Trump has issues with the extent of his popularity. We saw it with the extent to which he unsuccessfully tried to prove that more people attended his inauguration than Barack Obama’s inauguration. Even during Trump’s white power rant in Phoenix, it was clear he cared about crowd and protestor sizes even more than defending Nazis.
Trump’s obsession with the fact that he lost the popular vote in 2016 prompted Trump to hire Kris Kobach of all people to head an election commission. Kobach’s obsession with suppressing the vote was known.
Kobach was suppressing the vote in willing states with his deeply flawed cross-check (IVRC) system. According to the Brennan Center, IVRC has led to false positives and here’s a shocker: it over represented minority voters in a big way. When Rolling Stone investigated the system, they found the system flagged one in six Latinos, one in seven Asian Americans and one in nine African-Americans as potential double registrants in the states they reviewed.
The news gets more disturbing because the Associated Press reports that under Kobach’s watch, Kansas through out 3 times as many ballots as other similarly sized states.
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Experts are worried. Here’s what Wendy Weiser, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program said. “It is somewhat ironic that (Kobach) is claiming to really care about the integrity of voter rolls when this suggests that there may be a real problem that Kansas has with keeping voter rolls up to date,”
Jason Kander, former Secretary of State for Missouri and president of Let America Vote told AP: “Secretary Kobach uses every trick that he can to make it as hard as possible for eligible voters to cast a ballot — whether it is unconstitutional legislation, targeting immigrants or forcing more eligible voters to use provisional ballots,”
Aside from obsessing with vote suppression Trump and Kobach have something else in common. They’re losers in court. Just last month, a Federal Court upheld a court’s decision to fine Kobach earlier this year for his “pattern of misleading the courts in Voter ID cases.” In other words, Kobach lied to the courts often enough to earn a fine.
Kobach’s efforts to make voting harder in Kansas were struck down by the courts.
Everything about Kobach’s history shows a man so obsessed with suppressing the vote he will do all the things Jason Kander spoke about and lie to the courts without blinking an eye.
The only reason Trump hired Kobach is to suppress the vote. When the Kobach commission comes out with a report about immigrants voting en masse on instructions by little green men from Mars (or some variant) Trump’s fantasy of winning the popular vote becomes real to him and his most ardent supporters.
Also, Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and he won the electoral college based on a lean 80,000 votes in 3 states.
Since he took office, Trump is bleeding support from voters and from his party with his all drama, no accomplishment presidency. One doesn’t have to be a statistician or an expert on elections to understand that he can’t win in 2020 (if he is the Republican candidate) even with Russia’s help.
Former contributor.
