In what has to be considered a victory for those who care about voting rights, President Trump has disbanded the infamous voter fraud commission that he established last May, ostensibly to expose the "millions of illegal voters" he claimed had cost him the popular vote.
Co-chaired by the notorious "voter fraud zealot," Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the group immediately sparked controversy when many of the states refused to share data from voter lists because of privacy rights and concern for how the data might be misused. Several lawsuits were filed against the commission, one by a Democratic member of the commission himself.
The White House said it was disbanding so as to avoid having to spend time and taxpayer money on all the lawsuits that have followed against the commission. I'd suggest the real reason is that voting rights organizations were on to their game -- trying to find a few irregularities in voting to use to justify stricter voter registration and voter ID laws that suppress the vote in minority communities.
The job will now be passed on to the Department of Homeland Security (Kobach claims he will still head it), which dashes my hope that it would just get buried and forgotten.
What we need is congressional attention to voting rights and judicial attention to systemic violations and suppression, not trying to find the virtually non-existent case of actual voter impersonation. Everybody needs to pause and consider: What are we seeking here? If it is not the fair and unfettered right for all eligible citizens to vote, then it should be abandoned.
Ralph
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