Trump Will Find a New Way to Disenfranchise Voters

[Content Note: Voter suppression.]

Speaking of more important news...

Donald Trump's nightmare "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity" is being disbanded after it's become "mired in multiple federal lawsuits and faced resistance from states that accused it of overreach."

You might think that's good news, but of course it's not the whole story: "In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said...Trump had signed an executive order asking the Department of Homeland Security 'to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action.' ...[A senior White House aide], who was not authorized to speak on behalf of the commission and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the Department of Homeland Security is 'better equipped to take up the matter.'"

Why on earth would the Department of Homeland Security be "better equipped" to address voting fraud? If you think it's because there are foreign governments meddling in our elections, hahahaha of course that's not the reason, since the president doesn't even believe that's happening.

It's because DHS is tasked with executing Trump's nativist, anti-immigrant policies — and while Trump unaccountably believes Vladimir Putin when he says he didn't interfere in our election, he refuses to believe multiple nonpartisan researchers who have concluded that widespread voter fraud does not exist, and that millions of undocumented immigrants did not vote in the last presidential election or any other.

As ProPublica's Jessica Huseman noted on Twitter, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who was running the "Election Integrity" commission with Vice-President Mike Pence, confimed "what many experts suspected: DHS will look for non-citizens on the voter rolls states have already turned over. Kobach calls it a 'tactical shift.'"

Kobach said that he would remain in close contact with the White House and the Department of Homeland Security as that agency begins to investigate the issue instead of the commission. He said Trump made the final decision to disband the commission Wednesday after multiple weeks of discussion on the matter. DHS was chosen because the agency oversees immigration and can come up with an accurate estimate of the number of noncitizens on voter rolls, Kobach said.

"This is a tactical shift by the president who remains very committed to finding the scope of voter fraud," said Kobach, the architect of a controversial law that requires Kansas voters to provide their birth certificates or other proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. "In a perfect world, the commission would've moved swiftly and there wouldn't be any lawsuits."

That's the man tasked with protecting election integrity describing a "perfect world" as one in which he would have been allowed to disenfranchise voters across the country without anyone trying to stop him.

Republicans' attempts to undermine voting rights and voting access, especially among voters in demographics who historically tend to vote Democratic, continues to be a major concern.

And, once again, I will note that anyone who is talking about the "blue wave" they believe is coming in the 2018 midterms had better preoccupy themselves with what Trump, Pence, Kobach, and the DHS are up to.

Because there is no "blue wave" without free and fair elections.

And there will be no free and fair elections, if Republicans (and their pals in Russia) have anything to say about it.