Well, yeah, I know I'm ALWAYS pissed about trump being the
But this weekend my German/Irish ire kicked up a notch because trump's horrific "Voter Fraud" commission sent requests to all 50 states to give up every voter registration data they've got.
Damn them.
The entire Republican Narrative of "Mass Voter Fraud" is a lie. And yet the GOP runs with this Narrative because it gives them political cover to suppress voters, specifically the poor, the minorities, and the college age voting blocs.
What the GOP can do with voter information like this - everything down to Social Security number - might range from targeted harassment to broad voter suppression by geography/district.
The good news so far is that most of the states are refusing to aid trump's faux committee by complying. As Kathy Gill notes at the Moderate Voice:
The following states have indicated that they will not provide the Kobach Commission with all of the information it requested on Wednesday. These states are either ignoring the request, complying with their state laws (the request is for more than publicly available information), or waiting for assurances on how the data will be used.
AK, AL, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, GA, IA, ID, IN, KS, KY, MA, ME, MN, MO, MS, NC, ND, NH, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA (note: GOOD FOR YOU LOT!)
The following states have not received a letter:
AR, DE, HI, IL, MI
And these states have no decision or no comment:
FL, LA, MD, NE, NJ, SC, WV, WY
It's this last bit raising my ire. Florida should have only one response to this: on moral, legal, and common sense grounds, this state should tell the Republican Party to go fuck itself. We could have told them to go jump into the Gulf of Mexico, but Mississippi (!) beat us to it.
Here's the irony: a lot of Red States are telling this commission NO. Even they know this is a fool's errand, and that they'll be violating a shitload of their own laws. Even Kris Kobach's state Kansas forced Kobach to tell himself he'd have to give only the public domain info.
So what the hell are we waiting for, Florida? Sadly as Michael Van Stickler at the Tampa Bay Times reports:
Florida officials say they are considering a request for voter information from President Donald Trump's commission investigating alleged voter fraud in the 2016 election. The letter was from Kris Kobach, the vice chairman of the commission and Kansas' Republican secretary of state.
Gov. Rick Scott on Friday said he has not seen the letter that had been sent to Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner on Wednesday. But a spokeswoman for Detzner said the agency was reviewing the request.
This is a No-Brainer, Detzner. Write back to Kobach and trump and tell them NO DICE.
This Monday, bright and early, every Floridian needs to call the Department of State's office and insist our voter ID information remain unviolated. I certainly do not want trump to get ANY of my private information, and I sure as hell want to stop these false accusations about voter fraud.
Here's the number: 850-245-6500 and ask for Detzner and/or for the Elections office supervisor. BE POLITE BUT FIRM. Tell them you do not want your private voter information going to an unjust and harmful federal committee.
Get active, Florida.
1 comment:
Wait, hasn't the poor gulf suffered enough with the Deepwater Horizon spill?
And Kobach and company are as much responsible for the election of president four-year-old as any other factor. The crosscheck program purged the voter rolls of several hundred thousand Democratic voters in three states that he carried with less than a hundred thousand votes combined. This worked because many minority voters have the same name, so crosscheck finds another one in a different state and purges them as attempts to register twice. How many James Browns and Jose Garcias were purged? Answer: a lot. Many of them don't even have the same middle name.
http://www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/
In fact, it worked so well that he's trying to expand the program ahead of the 2018 midterms, and to his "commission" he has appointed two of the most virulent voter suppression advocates who have both been working to suppress the minority (read Democratic) vote for decades.
And, just by coincidence, the house appropriations committee just killed the funding for the agency tasked with protecting our voting systems from hacking and espionage.
And what, pray tell, do they plan on doing with all of that data? Perhaps posting it in a giant, non password protected file to a site on the internet and leaving it there for a few weeks for the Russians to scoop up, like the Republican contractor Deep Root Analytics did with 198 million voter's information already?
http://www.npr.org/2017/06/19/533551243/firm-contracted-by-rnc-left-millions-of-voter-files-unsecured-online
They have no credibility here, and this is a naked attempt at stacking an election they are likely to do poorly in more favorably for them.
-Doug in Oakland
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