Our plan to eliminate poverty through human attrition
Part 1 in a six-part series
Civil rights advocates say the outcome of the June, 2013 Supreme Court case gutting most of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 could decide which party wins the White House race in 2020. In the 2016 Presidential Election, exit polls indicated that Hillary Clinton won more than enough votes to secure the Electoral College in her favor, aside from the fact that she won the popular vote by a whopping 2.8 million ballots. Winning an election by taking away the rights of citizens to vote is not how a democracy is supposed to work.
The problem is the result of years of the Republican Party's manipulation of the various processes that compose our electoral system. It has been a concerted and well-planned effort to win at any cost, and has proven to be fruitful.
This article is the first in a series of six that will be published here over the next few months. These articles will describe the Republican's covert and, sometimes, not so covert actions to tear a major hole in our democracy. That's a serious claim, but the facts are undeniable. The Interstate Crosscheck system is abhorrent, but it is only one tool in the Republican toolbox, and we have a lot of tools yet to look at.
There are plenty of wolves in both major political parties, but the focus of this series of articles is on the Republican Party, who have been much more nefariously organized in their assertive effort to undermine our democracy. It is not an indictment of conservatism. It is an indictment of a very small group of individuals who have recklessly and underhandedly taken control of one of our major political parties. But the blame does not all lie with these individuals. Just as aptly, the blame lies with those members of the Party who are more concerned with their own careers or the desires of their donors than the health and welfare of the citizens of this country and, indeed, the system of democracy itself. It is unfortunate to say that, with few exceptions, this encompasses the entire Congressional and judicial membership of the Party as it stands today.
Since most people's established political belief's are built around hearsay and fast-news sandwiches from the mainstream media, they are not even aware that such a tear exists. Defenders of the establishment believe the subject is such a hot potato that they deal with it in the only way that twisted logic always deals with such matters - they ignore the problem altogether. To them, recognizing the problem would only further politically divide the country and cause people to lose faith in the democratic process itself. On the other hand, laying it out in the open and dealing with the problem would spark a new interest in just what this thing called democracy is all about. And it should be noted that, with a large number of Americans, for a variety of reasons, faith in the system has already been lost.
"They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down."
-- Paul Weyrich, co-founder of ALEC, a conservative organization who's main focus is the drafting of legislation. The organization mainly represents corporate interests through state legislatures
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 put an end to the massive disenfranchisement, through all kinds of nefarious means, of voters of color, that had been taking place since former slaves and their descendants were allowed to vote. The U.S. Supreme Court, in June of 2013, by a 5-4 vote, gutted key portions of that act, allowing modern-day, somewhat secretive, "Jim Crow" activities to fill the void. One of those methods was the Crosscheck system.
Masterminded by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach (Donald Trump's "voter fraud" specialist), and somewhat modeled after ChoicePoint, which stripped registration rolls in Florida in the 2000 election, it appears that Crosscheck eliminated the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of minority voters without their knowledge. Voters went to the polls and cast their ballots, only to have them thrown out when run against the Crosscheck list of supposedly fraudulent voters. Nationally, of this massive number of illegal voters whose ballots were thrown in the dumpster, they could find only four people to charge with the crime. None of those charges led to a conviction.According to federal records, in the 2012 election, out of 100 million U.S. registered voters, not one voted two times.
The Interstate Crosscheck list was compiled by electronically cross-checking voter registrations across the U.S. of voters who, supposedly, were registered in more than one state. Crosscheck lists were distributed to 30 GOP secretaries of state across the country, to be used to purge voting roles. Dick Morris, the Republican elections director for the state of North Carolina, bragged on Fox News that he had a list of 35,000 people who had voted in North Carolina as well as another state, and that there were a million across the nation. Investigative reporter Greg Palast and his team managed to obtain some of these closely-held lists, which displayed some startling discoveries, as noted in his book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".
Palast went knocking on the door of Josh Lawson, spokesman for Republican officials in Raleigh, North Carolina's capital. He wanted to know how many of the criminal voters had been arrested. According to Palast, Lawson replied that none had been prosecuted because "We haven't located them. They are difficult to find."
When questioned about this in a 2014 interview on Democracy Now, Lawson said "It's not about just going and blanketly trying to arrest somebody. You have to have evidence of a crime." Okay. What, then, is also difficult to find is a reason to justify the purging of thousands of votes without having enough personally identifiable information to at least find one of them, let alone having enough evidence to charge them with a crime.
Palast managed to obtain over 3 million names on the Crosscheck list, from three different states, with the help of investigative reporter Badpenny von Eckardt and photojournalist Zach D. Roberts, who first discovered the Crosscheck system.
Taking two names from the list, who were, supposedly, the same person, James Elmer Barnes, Jr. of Georgia, and James Cross Barnes, III of Vermont, Palast had no trouble locating one of Morris' "difficult to find" voters. Said Palast, "Mr. James Elmer Barnes, Jr. told me he had never used the middle name 'Cross', never been 'III' (the 'third'), and never been to the state of Virginia, let alone voted there. Georgia and Vermont officials wouldn't explain why these clearly different Mr. Barnes were still on the suspect list. Indeed, the public officials wouldn't talk to me at all."
Palast cites several other examples, including a woman in her 90's who had never even been outside the county she lived in, let alone another state 2,000 miles away. What is criminal here is not the voters who's names appear on the lists, but a system that allows the illegal purging of voters right to cast their ballots without any evidence other than the fact that another voter in another state has the same first and last name and birth date. Voters were declared guilty until proven innocent, but there was no one to stand up for their innocence. Certainly, the voters did not know until they were rejected at their polling place. Many never knew at all, their votes purged after the fact.
Here is a sample Palast cited of the 27,456 individuals in the USA named "James Brown"
Mark Swedlund, a database expert who is a consultant for companies like eBay, Amazon and American Express, says that Amazon uses as many as 35 matching points before they decide that two names might belong to the same person. Crosscheck only uses two - first and last name and birth date. Said Swedlund, "God forbid your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the U.S., and your first name is Joseph or Jose. You're probably suspected of voting in 27 states." Swedlund also stated, "I'm a data guy. I can't tell you what the intent was. I can only tell you what the outcome is. And the outcome is discriminatory against minorities."
71% of Hispanic Americans vote Democratic. 73% of Asian Americans, 84% of Native Americans, and 93% of African Americans vote Democratic. As Palast states, "In just twenty years, the number of non-white voters has nearly doubled to a fourth of the electorate. And in the last election, the number of White voters actually fell by two million."
"Even a small drop in the share of Black voters would wipe out [Democrat's] winning margin" -- Republican strategist Karl Rove
The "swing" states of Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, Florida and Virginia hold the keys to the Electoral College process. A win in all of those states quite assures the clinching of the presidential election. The 2000 election of George W. Bush was decided upon 537 votes in the state of Florida, while 58,000 alleged felons were purged from the Florida voting rolls. 44% of those on the list were Black. After the election, the NAACP sued the state of Florida for violating the voting Rights Act. In the settlement, Boca Raton-based Database Technologies (DBT), the company that accumulated the purge list for the state, was required to run the same purge list using stricter criteria. This turned up 12,000 voters who had never created a felony and, thus, should not have been on the list. That is 22 times the 537-vote lead that put Bush in the White House. Beyond a doubt, the purge cost Al Gore the election. There were other improprieties in Florida voting that year, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush blamed them all on Florida Secretary of State and George Bush campaign chairwoman, Katherine Harris, but we'll save the 2000 election for a later chapter.
The Supreme Courts 2013 gutting of the core of the 1965 Voting Rights Act opened the door to new means of voter suppression. As writer Ari Bermen wrote in The Nation in July of 2015, "That decision has led to new voter-suppression efforts in states like North Carolina and Texas, and has set a chilling precedent for voting rights in the Obama era. The result has been the most significant effort to restrict voting rights since the Jim Crow era. From 2011 to 2015, 468 voting restrictions have been introduced in 49 states. Half the states in the country have passed new laws making it harder to vote. None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for the 2000 election in Florida."
Kris Kobach is an interesting fella. Among his achievements:
Federal law prohibits most of what Trump, Kobach and vice-president Mike Pense, the chair of the Commission, want to do. The administration has shown, time and time again, that it has no respect for the law or, indeed, for the justice system, except in ways that it works to further their agenda.
Clearly, when a Republican official admits that they haven't arrested anybody because they don't have any evidence of a crime, but they deprived thousands of citizens of the right to vote, that is a serious violation of federal law, but Jeff Sessions' justice department doesn't seem too interested.
A former senior official at the Department of Justice, in an interview with The Guardian, said, "List maintenance is a little bit like surgery. When it's done by people with skill and precision tools in a calm environment, it can be tremendously helpful, even life-saving. When it's done sloppily by people who don't know what they are doing on a shaky table in a hurry, it can be quite dangerous. What Kobach wants is surgery on a rickety table with a chainsaw."
The Guardian article stated "Many observers point out that past presidential commissions on voting have been scrupulously bipartisan and recruited universally recognized experts in their fields. This one, by contrast, appears to be driven largely by one man on a mission to make what Rosenberg, the voting rights specialist, called "fallacious recommendations".
The vice-president's home state of Indiana passed a law last July, Senate Bill 442, which puts Indiana in violation of provisions of The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), which Kobach wants to rewrite, as it stands in the way of much that he wants to do. The NVRA imposes protections against wrongful voter removals. The Indiana act, often called the "motor-voter" act, allows election officials to remove voters who appear on a Crosscheck list without confirmation or notice and a two-election waiting period, which the NVRA requires. The NAACP and the League of Women Voters of Indiana have challenged the law in court.
The 2016 election was decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania
In the 2016 election, Ohio officials, in violation of federal law, dropped 400,000 voters from the rolls because they had not cast ballots in recent elections (four years - just one federal election cycle). "This is very unusual", League of Women Voters executive director Carrie L. Davis told the Internet publication "Mic". "We're not talking about removing people who have died, moved out of state or are in prison for a felony. These are people eligible to vote and they got kicked off and many times they didn't even know it until they went to vote and their names weren't there anymore." A suit, brought by the Brennan Center for Justice, the League of Women Voters, and other voting rights advocacy groups, was filed with the Supreme Court in the fall of 2016, and the Ohio process was overturned in June of 2018. The state got its' day in court. The citizens who were deprived of their right to vote did not. The state is simply told not to do it any more. Unfortunately, says Carrie Davis, "It's unclear whether these voters' rights will be automatically restored since the state treats deceased voters the same as people who sit out a few elections. If the state is intent on managing the voter rolls effectively, why wouldn't they have the ability to make such an important distinction?"
The electoral system is the foundation of democracy. When there is a tear in that foundation, the entire system is weakened. If the tear is big enough and consistent enough, that system will, eventually, collapse. Today, we are faced with such a tear at the core of our democracy and little is being done to repair it.
Our "founding fathers" were well aware of the frailties of the human ethic. Their spirit and drive was for civil justice against the tyranny of those who seek to control the populous by sets of rules that only benefit those in power, establishing systems to assure the institutionalization of that control. Jefferson warned us by saying at the onset, "We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors, would all become wolves."
There is so much information to deal with here that I have decided to divide that information into a series of articles. As Sherlock Holmes once said, "It is one of those cases where the art of the reasoner should be used rather for the sifting of details than for the acquiring of fresh evidence. The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete and of such personal importance to so many people that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact - of absolute undeniable fact - from the embellishment of theorists and reporters. Thus, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our duty to see what inferences may be drawn, and what are the special points upon which the whole mystery turns."
Editor's Note: Time constraints have kept me from my goal of finishing this series before the 2018 midterms. As a matter of fact, this article, itself, will be edited and amended in the near future, and I am still working on the structure and navigation of this blog. That said, I have had requests to release this now, so I am doing so. Of course, the Crosscheck system will have more of an effect in the national elections in 2020. However, I agreed to publish this now in the hope of encouraging more people of the necessity to get out and VOTE!