Recent Court Rulings Against Voter Supression Laws

Washington, DC (CNN) — Forty-four states have refused to provide certain types of voter information to the Trump administration's election integrity commission, according to a CNN inquiry to all 50 states.

This reminder is why it is important this year to vote the democrat ticket in the presidential slot at the polls. If Trump wins, he will appoint a judge who will reverse those recent gains in correcting voter repression laws.

Maybe Democrats should advocate for free national ids (voluntary of course, but well advertised, and easy to obtain), so that we could stop defending lax voter identification methods at the polls.

ALI VELSHI (HOST): What are you trying to get at? You're asking for -- you're asking for people's names, initials, middle initials, date of birth, whatever. That's normal, right? Then you want your political party --

KRIS KOBACH: Most states are going to give name, date of birth --

VELSHI: Right. Then you want political party, you want voter history, and information regarding felony convictions, and information regarding voter registration in another state, information iregarding military status and overseas citizen information. What are you going to do with all that information?

KOBACH: Okay. Well, let me give you an example. The Pew Charitable Foundation, their trusts -- one of their trusts, has estimated that 1.8 million deceased individuals are on the voter rolls in the country, and they think their estimate is low. Well, we could actually find out what the real number is, if we take the voter rolls of the states and we match them against the Social Security Administrations deaths -- list of people who have died. Let's find out what the real number is, and then if have you the voter history, you can say, "Okay, how many of these names appear to have voted after the date of death?"

VELSHI: Right, and --

KOBACH: So it's just a matter of actual numbers versus --

VELSHI: That's interesting, except you --

KOBACH: It's very interesting, and why not find out?

VELSHI: Because you got this wrong. You actually went after a particular voter who you said was dead and voted in an election, and it turned out that the guy was very much alive, and I think a newspaper found him mowing his lawn.

KOBACH: Right.

Republicans would make it easier to steal an election by killing the Election Assistance Commission.

In a little-noticed 6-3 vote February 7, 2017 the House Administration Committee voted along party lines to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission, which helps states run elections and is the only federal agency charged with making sure voting machines can’t be hacked. The EAC was created after the disastrous 2000 election in Florida as part of the Help America Vote Act to rectify problems like butterfly ballots and hanging chads. (Republicans have tried to kill the agency for years.) The Committee also voted to eliminate the public-financing system for presidential elections dating back to the 1970s.

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“It is my firm belief that the EAC has outlived its usefulness and purpose,” said Committee chair Gregg Harper (R-MS), explaining why his bill transfers the EAC’s authority to the Federal Election Commission.

Thirty-eight pro-democracy groups, including the NAACP and Common Cause, denounced the vote. “The EAC is the only federal agency which has as its central mission the improvement of election administration, and it undertakes essential activities that no other institution is equipped to address,” says the Brennan Center for Justice.

This move is particularly worrisome given reports that suspected Russian hackers attempted to access voter-registration systems in more than 20 states during the 2016 election. Moreover, the Presidential Commission on Election Administration set up by President Obama in 2014 outlined an “impending crisis” in voting technology and the Brennan Center found that 42 states used voting machines in 2016 that were at least a decade-old and at risk of failing. The EAC was the agency tasked with making sure these voting systems were both modernized and secure.

The EAC is not a perfect agency. It lacked a quorum of members from 2010 to 2014 and was paralyzed by inaction. Then, last year, its executive director unilaterally approved controversial proof-of-citizenship laws in Kansas, Georgia, and Alabama, which the federal courts subsequently blocked.

But given the threats to American democracy at this moment, the EAC needs to be strengthened, not replaced.

It’s particularly ironic that the Trump administration is preparing to launch a massive investigation into nonexistent voter fraud based on the lie that millions voted illegally while House Republicans are shutting down the agency that is supposed to make sure America’s elections are secure. It’s more proof of how the GOP’s real agenda is to make it harder to vote.

The Trump administration announced plans to keep voter roll data it has requested from all 50 states and the District of Columbia on White House computers under the direction of a member of Vice President Mike Pence's staff, it told a federal judge Thursday.

The disclosure of the White House role came in a government filing required in a lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a watchdog organization that has asked a federal judge in Washington to block the requests for voter data until the impact on Americans' privacy can be fully assessed.

A decision on the request for a temporary restraining order by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is expected as early as Friday afternoon.

The commission's request for voting information has caused a nationwide uproar.

f you're itching to despair more deeply for the future of the country, check out Pema Levy's extensive reporting in Mother Jones on how former members of the vote-suppressing Bush 43 Justice Department have privatized the ethical swamp they all made out of it, and how they're now engaged as private citizens in money-whipping poor—and largely minority—counties into purging their voter rolls. The details are as sorry as you can expect them to be.

In June 2014, Miller and her four fellow election commissioners received a letter threatening legal action if they did not purge voters from the rolls. The letter came from the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), a Virginia-based group that has fashioned itself in recent years as a conservative counterpart to the ACLU. The ACRU requested that the commissioners reduce the number of registered voters by the midterm elections that fall because, it claimed, there were more people registered than there were voting-age citizens in the county. The commissioners wanted to fight back, but lacking the funds to hire an attorney, they decided not to respond and waited to see what would happen next.

The letter they had received was one of many that the ACRU had started sending to small, rural counties across Mississippi, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arizona the year before. These letters were part of a legal campaign spearheaded by three former Justice Department officials from the George W. Bush administration to purge voter rolls across the country. The effort began in remote areas with few resources for legal defense, but recently it's expanded to include population centers in key swing states.

Recall that the scandal involving the firing for political purposes of several U.S. Attorneys happened because those lawyers refused to chase phantom voter fraud at the behest of the Bush White House. As it turns out, some familiar characters never left the stage.

At the time Noxubee County got its letter, the ACRU's legal work was led by J. Christian Adams, a former staff attorney in the Voting Section of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Adams joined the department in 2005, when high-ranking official Bradley Schlozman was found by the department's inspector general to be illegally using political ideology to fill the Civil Rights Division with conservative lawyers. Adams, a conservative attorney from South Carolina, was "exhibit A" of Schlozman's hiring practices, a former department official who participated in Adams' job interview later said.

Adams' early cases at the ACRU were assisted by Christopher Coates, Adams' former boss at the Justice Department. Previously an attorney for the ACLU, Coates appears to have undergone an ideological conversion while at the Justice Department; one colleague suggested this might have been spurred in part by the promotion of a black attorney to a job he wanted. In 2007, with Bush in office, he rose to Voting Section chief. Like Adams, Robert Popper joined the Voting Section in 2005 and later became Coates' deputy. When he left the department in 2013, he joined the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, an early player in spearheading voter purge cases.

Basically, the scam works this way: This bunch sends a threatening letter to an impoverished local election commission. Do what we say, the letter says, or we'll find some plaintiffs and sue you down to your socks and underwear. Often, these election commissions don't have the dough to pay a single billable hour to a decent lawyer. So, rather than face the lawsuit, the commission agrees to sign a "consent degree" by which it agrees to do what the Washington freebooters want it to do.

It's a shakedown, pure and simple. And it works.

In November 2015, the ACRU filed a lawsuit against the commission in federal court, alleging that there were 9,271 names on the registered voter list in a county with just 8,245 eligible voters. The case docket was notably one-sided. The ACRU would file motions, and the commission—still lawyer-less—would fail to respond. Five months after filing the suit, the ACRU moved for a default judgement against the commission. The judge said the commission should have an attorney to go over the terms of the agreement, and the county paid a local attorney about $1,000 to help the commissioners resolve the suit, according to two of the commissioners. (An attorney for the ACRU also recalled that the county hired the lawyer, but the county's Board of Supervisors told Mother Jones it had no record of hiring or paying an attorney in this case.) Some of the commissioners viewed him as ineffectual.

"He didn't know as much about it as my daughter do," Miller says. His advice was to sign the decree. "They had our backs up against the wall," recalls John Bankhead, the commission's chairman. Under pressure, three of the five commissioners finally signed the consent decree. Miller and one other refused. The judge declined to accept it without all five on board, and the ACRU renewed its push for a default judgement. "We are not gonna get those [voter] cards back," Miller told her colleagues. "I promised my voters I would look out for them, and to me, that's not looking out for them."

Noxubee County is 71 percent black. Its residents have a median yearly family income of a little more than $27,000, and 32 percent of the people there live below the poverty line. In Macon, the county seat, that number rises to almost 50 percent. Meanwhile, the ACRU gets about $2 million in grants every year from the usual suspects like the Bradley Foundation. So Adams and his group picked their target well.

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If you read the story carefully, you will find the ACRU hooked up in its efforts with True The Vote, another voter suppression outfit. TTV got famous because it was the main "victim" in the IRS screw-up regarding the tax-exemptions of "nonpartisan social welfare" organizations like True The Vote. It turns out that the ACRU is one of those nonpartisan social welfare operations, too. Our election laws are a farce..