Voter suppression time

The Times reports:

President Trump plans to name Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has pressed for aggressive measures to crack down on undocumented immigrants, to a long-promised commission to investigate voting fraud in the United States, a White House official said Thursday.

The commission is the official follow-through on Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that several million “illegals” voted for his Democratic rival and robbed him of a victory in the national popular vote.

An unsubstantiated claim of that kind is more properly called a lie, especially when it’s made with malice by a sitting president. Trump just makes shit up, and since he’s not six years old and not talking about pixies in the garden, that is lying.

Mr. Kobach, who has championed the strictest voter identification laws in the country, will be the vice chairman of the commission, which is to be led by Vice President Mike Pence and is expected to include about a dozen others, including state officials from both political parties, the official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to detail an announcement expected later Thursday.

We know how this will go. They will cook the books and use the books as a reason to make voting ever more difficult. The more difficult it is to vote, the fewer disadvantaged people are able to vote, because of the disadvantages. If voting takes place in few locations and during working hours and with burdensome requirements for layers of identification, then fewer poor people will be able to vote. They’re basically doing everything they can to make sure most people who vote Democratic can’t vote.

Mr. Kobach has been the driving force behind a Kansas law requiring new voters to produce a passport, a birth certificate or naturalization papers as proof of citizenship or be denied the ability to cast ballots. He worked last year to disqualify the state and local votes of thousands of people who did not meet the criteria. He has advocated the proof-of-citizenship requirement at the federal level as well, citing rampant voter fraud without producing proof of a widespread problem.

“Kris Kobach being named to run a commission on ‘voter integrity’ is like naming Bernie Madoff to run a commission on financial crimes,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice Education Fund. “He has dedicated his professional career to trying to deny people of color the vote and to trying to drive millions of immigrants out of the country.”

Civil rights groups also reacted with alarm to the impending creation of the task force, arguing that Mr. Trump’s own comments about illegal voting by immigrants suggested that his intent was to work to restrict the voting rights of minorities.

Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called the commission “a thinly veiled voter suppression task force,” adding that it was “designed to impugn the integrity of African-American and Latino participation in the political process.”

If they would only learn to vote Republican Trump would be more understanding.

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