Another sudden discovery in primary voting

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s narrow lead over Gov. Jeff Colyer in the GOP primary race for governor shrunk on Thursday after officials discovered a mistake in voting totals.

Kobach’s lead has been sliced from 191 to 91 votes after officials noticed a discrepancy in Colyer's totals in Thomas County. Results remain unofficial, and the race is still too close to call.

The secretary of state’s website lists Kobach with 466 votes to Colyer’s 422 in Thomas County.

However, the Thomas County election results page shows Colyer with 522 votes to Kobach's 466.

  The Hill

Hmm. And who is Secretary of State?

Bold move on the secretary's part.

Kansas elections director Bryan Caskey told The Associated Press that officials noticed the discrepancy during a routine post-election review of voting totals.

[...]

[Kobach] was the vice chairman of Trump's since-disbanded commission to investigate unfounded claims of voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election, which he said cost him the popular vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Voter fraud? I think it's obvious where the fraud lies.  But wasn't he just the perfect Trump pick to head something called the Election Integrity Commission?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

We know where the fraud lies

And it's not with voters.

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, a Democrat who served on President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission, published a trove of documents Friday that he said show zero signs of mass voter fraud, declaring that the White House’s claims about wide-scale fraud are "false."

"I have reviewed the documents made available to me and they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud," Dunlap wrote in a letter that took aim at Trump’s repeated — and baseless — claims that millions of people voted illegally.

Dunlap had sued the government to obtain the records he published Friday, which he said the administration had been hiding.

The commission’s co-chairs, Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, had claimed that widespread fraudulent voting required stringent new regulations, which critics said would block people of color who are legally registered to vote and who tend to lean Democratic, from accessing the polls.

The documents were all posted online.

  Buzzfeed

And, speaking of Kris Kobach...

Kris Kobach’s gubernatorial campaign employs three men identified as members of a white nationalist group by two political consultants who have worked with Republicans in Kansas.

  Topeka Capital-Journal Online

I assume that's a winning point for many, if not most, of Kobach's supporters.

Kobach spokeswoman Danedri Herbert rejects the accusation as a baseless distraction from real news in the closing days of a contested GOP primary race.

[...]

The consultants in early July independently named the three men, all in their early 20s, as members of American Heritage Initiative, a splinter of Identity Evropa, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as as a campus-based white supremacy group that builds community from shared racial identity.

[...]

Herbert said the three told her they never heard of American Heritage Initiative and aren’t members of such a group.

[...]

“It is baffling to me, a black woman who serves as Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s spokeswoman, that so many in the media are digging up fake news when they should be investigating real stories.”

[...]

None of the three responded to messages seeking comment this week.

[...]

[One of the men] attracted attention for remarks he made last year in a discussion group for the Kansas Federation of College Republicans. He posted an image of a student reading “Brown is the New White,” a book by Steve Phillips about a progressive, multiracial majority who could win elections if mobilized.

In his comment under the photo, Gustin used the N-word and complained of people who are “openly anti-white.”

“These people know they’re not oppressed,” he wrote. “They just hate white people and are jealous of us. They know they can bully us with the oppression stuff until they’re granted EXTRA rights, because most have been brainwashed with disingenuous, weaponized, cherry picked history into white guilt. They won’t stop until we grow a spine. The USA is the least racist country in the world. We have so much racial tension because we ALLOW and SUBSIDIZE tens of millions of people from other groups to come here.”

[...]

Last year, SPLC reported Kobach met with an adviser in Topeka who was fined for hate speech in Austria. He also spoke in 2015 at a writer’s workshop for The Social Contract Press, which publishes white nationalist material. He defended the group and takes contributions from K.C. McAlpin, executive director of the group’s parent organization, US Inc.

A devastating story by The Star and ProPublica showed that Kobach’s lucrative career chasing anti-immigrant legislation is a sham. The secretary of state has earned at least $800,000 over the years traveling from city to city to draft and defend rickety ordinances aimed at restricting immigration.

To their deep regret, officials in those communities did not know what Kansans have learned: Kobach is a terrible lawyer. In city after city, his poorly drafted ordinances were struck down by the courts, even though Kobach was paid handsomely to write them and defend them in court.

Valley Park, Mo., taxpayers coughed up $300,000 because officials there were sold on Kobach’s pitch. The city’s immigration ordinance, drafted with Kobach’s help, was eventually gutted.

Grant Young, Valley Park’s former mayor, described Kobach’s approach: “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem, and maybe I can advance my political position ... and maybe make some money at the same time,” he said.

It may be the best description ever of Kris Kobach’s understanding of public service.

It wasn’t just Valley Park, of course. Farmers Branch, Texas, ended up $7 million in the hole. Hazleton, Pa., borrowed $1.4 million to pay for Kobach’s folly. Taxpayers in Fremont, Neb., raised property taxes to put money in Kobach’s pocket.

[...]

Kobach was sanctioned by a federal judge for contempt. He has been ordered to take remedial classes in basic courtroom rules.

Kobach helped President Donald Trump form a voting commission aimed in part at exploring the laughable contention that Trump actually won the popular vote in 2016. Predictably, the commission collapsed from its own silliness.

  Kansas City Star

And now he's running for governor of Kansas. Any bets?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Could this be why Trump's "election integrity" commission decided to destroy all its data before shutting down?

President Donald Trump’s election fraud commission asked every state and the District for detailed voter registration data, but in Texas’s case it took an additional step: it asked to see Texas records that identify all voters with Hispanic surnames, newly released documents show. In buying nearly 50 million records from the state with the nation’s second largest Hispanic population, a researcher for the White House panel checked a box on two Texas public voter data request forms explicitly asking for the “Hispanic surname flag notation,” to be included in information sent to the commission, according to copies of the signed and notarized state forms.

[...]

Commission member Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (D), who has sued the panel to disclose records that he says were not provided to him, said the selection of Hispanic names appeared improper and could explain why the panel has sought to act in secret.

[...]

“It’s all speculation because they haven’t disclosed anything, but if they are breaking things down along racial and ethnic lines,’ Dunlap said, it indicates why they are guarding this information like hungry dogs cornered in a trap.”

[...]

White House and Texas officials said the Texas voter data was never delivered because a lawsuit brought by Texas voting rights advocates after the request last year temporarily stopped any data handoff.

The commission was disbanded Jan. 3 after Trump cited a host of ongoing state and federal lawsuits and resistance from state officials over the sweeping pursuit of information about more than 150 million voters across the country. The commission said it would destroy all voter data it had gathered, without detailing any data purchases.

[...]

The commission vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach (R) who launched the drive to collect data from every state, said “at no time did the commission request any state to flag surnames by ethnicity or race. It’s a complete surprise to me.”

[...]

Such “information does not, did not advance the commission’s inquiry in any way, and this is the first I’ve heard the Texas files included that,” Kobach said Friday.

  WaPo

Riiiiiiight.

Who knew they were buying records in the first place?

The documents appear to show for the first time that the Trump commission paid for the processing and release of records from 10 states in September. Earlier, voting rights groups had identified 20 states that turned over information voluntarily.

I hope those ten states are suing to get their money back.

The commission faces lawsuits by at least 10 voting and public accountability groups, seeking information on what other data the panel may have assembled, if any analysis was done and whether information has been shared outside the White House.

[...]

“There was never a request made to flag people based on their ethnicity,” the White House official said Friday. “That was never asked for, nor is that what this [Texas] response is saying, though I can see why some could read it that way,” the official said.

Can you now?

Records of the Texas data purchase were disclosed after Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) on Nov. 13 requested information about interactions between the U.S. General Services Administration and the commission.

Good for Claire. She's been working hard lately. She tried to get military pay exempted from the government shutdown, but was shot down by that mean old fossil McConnell. But she did let us down by voting to extend the NSA surveilance recently, so I can't give her a clean bill of health.

UPDATE:

She also just voted to let the Democrats be played for fools by the Republicans again on the government shutdown, where they should have been holding out for a DACA deal.

UPDATE:

Oh, lord.

On Monday, the Washington Post reported that the panel had purchased Texas election records that flagged all registered voters with Hispanic last names. Kris Kobach, who led the commission, claims he was unaware of that acquisition, which was made by a researcher who was recently arrested on child pornography charges.

  Slate

Somebody must have asked how this story could be worse.

According to Kobach, it was Ronald Williams II, a policy adviser on the commission, who bought the data. “Mr. Williams did not ask any member of the commission whether he should check that box or not,” Kobach asserted, “so it certainly wasn’t a committee decision.”

I'm guessing Kobach decided that Williams was already persona non grata, so why not lay the blame on him?

In October, Williams was arrested and charged with the possession and distribution of child pornography. (He has pleaded not guilty.) While the Post was not able to reach Williams for comment, the available evidence does bear out Kobach’s version of the events. Only Williams’ name appears on the invoice, and he indeed merely had to check a box to request the Hispanic voter data. The records also indicate Williams handled these kind of requests with virtually no oversight.

Yeah, OK. Why wouldn't Kobach give the commission's data to commission members? Why did Matthew Dunlap have to sue to get access to documents on a commission he was part of?

A judge ruled in Dunlap’s favor, but Kobach, through the Department of Justice, still refuses to turn over the requested records. “Perhaps the only surprising aspect of the Department of Justice response,” Dunlap said in response, “is their rich blend of arrogance and contempt for the rule of law.”

Unbelievable.

Another wasted effort

White House Director of Information Technology Charles Herndon [...] that White House press secretary Sarah Sanders' comment last week that the commission's "preliminary findings" were being sent to DHS was inaccurate.

  Politico

You know what this says to me? The data proved there is no voter fraud to speak of.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump Fail

Working our way to normalizing a fascist government

Does anybody else find it mind-boggling that we are now to a stage where a member of a bi-partisan commission has to sue to get access to the commission's records?

A federal judge on Friday ordered President Trump's voter fraud commission to turn over internal documents and give one of its Democratic members more access to the panel's records, according to multiple reports.

[...]

The commission, formally known as the President's Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, was created after Trump falsely claimed that millions of illegal votes cost him the popular vote in the 2016 election. Critics have accused the panel of being politically motivated, saying it's an attempt to substantiate the Trump claims.

  Axios

Where would they get that idea?

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What happened to the "voter fraud" commission?

[Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity] has all but disappeared publicly.

[...]

The commission has met just twice formally.

[...]

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap and Alabama judge Alan King recently wrote letters to the commission’s staff complaining about the secrecy.

“I don’t know when the next meetings are or how many meetings there will be,” the judge told the Associated Press.

[...]

The commission ran into immediate problems last summer when it asked for voter data from all 50 states. Several states denounced the request and refused to comply in whole or in part.

Lawsuits followed. By mid-July, the Washington Post reported, at least seven plaintiffs had sued the commission, including the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The cases are winding their way through the courts.

[...]

The lack of public discussion does not mean the commission isn’t working privately, of course.

[...]

Perhaps the commission is fading into well-deserved oblivion.

We’re more worried. The commission’s lack of transparency and visible accomplishment could be a smoke-screen designed to protect it from criticism and embarrassment until next year, when it can drop dubious recommendations and unsubstantiated claims just weeks before the mid-term elections.

[...]

Several Senate Democrats are fed up. They wrote the Government Accountability Office in October, asking for a review of the commission’s activities. They want to know how much the commission costs, whether it’s following federal rules and how it’s doing its work.

GAO has agreed to the review.

  Kansas City.com

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 11/9:

Matthew Dunlap, Maine Secretary of State and member of the Commission is suing the Commission for access to necessary documents.  Crazy.

How to Manager the Message

The Election Integrity Commission, popularly known as the Voter Suppression Commission, had its first "public" meeting.

Vice-President Mike Pence spoke at the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity on Wednesday morning.

"We want to hear the voice of the American voter," he said. "Because that's really what this is all about."

[...]

President Donald Trump established the commission with an executive order in May and spoke briefly in the room on Wednesday morning, describing the meeting as "very, very important".

The presidential order stated that the commission would hold public meetings.

[...]

But although its first gathering was live-streamed, it took place on the third floor of a Washington DC secure facility that is off limits to members of the public.

  BBC

Pretty sure they weren't expecting a favorable public reaction.

The room was filled with people who worked for the White House, ranging from senior aides (Sebastian Gorka and Omarosa Manigault were there) to interns.

Many of the interns had been invited at the last minute, one of them told me.

Needed to fill the room for the optics.

Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit [...] saying the commission was required to hold open meetings under the federal advisory committee act.

[...]

[Committee vice-chair Kansas Secretary of State Kris] Kobach sat at a long table with a wooden gavel in front of him.

He and others discussed voting equipment, voter IDs and US census bureau surveys.

[...]

Many people wanted to attend the meeting but weren't allowed in.

[...]

[Kobach claimed] the meeting had been held in "broad daylight".

Technically true.

One of the members, the Heritage Foundation's Hans von Spakovsky, said his mother grew up in Nazi Germany and taught him the value of the democratic process.

[...]

Anyway, said Mr Spakovsky, [the meeting] was not a big deal.

Is there anything about this administration that isn't sleazy and underhanded?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Deconstructing America - Part Whatever

That mockery of a presidential commission sat for the first time Wednesday morning, but it was years in the making. [Dissenting Scupreme Court Justice] John Paul Stevens saw it coming. In 2000, the Supreme Court blessed official ratfcking with a constitutional imprimatur. Famously, it held that its decision in that case was "limited to the circumstances" of the 2000 election and, therefore, had no precedential value. That may be true in the nation's courts, but it has proven to be a deadly precedent in our politics.

[...]

[T]he past 17 years has been the worst period for voting rights since the collapse of Reconstruction, and it all goes back to the dynamics unleashed in our politics in 2000. In 2000, for example, Florida contracted for a voter "purge" list that disenfranchised an estimated 20,000 voters, most of them minority citizens, because their names were similar to those of convicted felons. And, now, we have the Interstate Voter Crosscheck Program, which is to that Florida purge list what an oak is to an acorn. The entire Republican political apparatus, state and federal, has been dedicated to rolling back every hard-won expansion of the franchise and democratization of the franchise back to 1913.

I chose that date because that was when the 17th Amendment calling for the direct election of senators was ratified and, as John Nichols points out in The Nation, they're even after that now. You may be comfortable handing the election of senators over to monkeyhouses like the Kansas and Texas state legislatures, but I'm not. This is, of course, part and parcel with the attempt to call a Constitutional Convention under Article V, a constitutional neutron bomb that is dangerously close to exploding.

[...]

So now we have the hideous spectacle of Kris Kobach, the manifestly dishonest secretary of state from Kansas, and the father of the Crosscheck system, having been tasked at the highest level of the federal government with delegitimizing and suppressing votes over the entire country. The spirit of the Brooks Brothers Riot that stopped the 2000 recount in Dade County is now the official policy of a presidential administration, and not by accident, either.

[...]

True, the pushback on Kobach has been vigorous. (He's getting sued so often you'd think he was President* Trump and the NAACP was a bunch of contractors he'd stiffed.) But the patterns of force unleashed 17 years ago continue unabated in our politics, in our political dialogue, and in our perceptions of ourselves as a self-governing people. Every time a citizen declines to vote because "they're all the same," and every time a citizen declines to vote because it's too much trouble, those patterns win again. And if you want an argument that every election matters, imagine where we'd be on the travel ban without state attorneys general, or where we'd be on voting rights issues without the steadfast resistance of secretaries of state around the country.

  Charles P Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

There Always Is

And may I just add --- yes, you already know --- Why won't Trump share his tax returns? Why is the Trump cabal doing so much lying about Junior's infamous meeting?  Why didn't Trump reveal his second encounter with Putin?  There's something. There always is.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Jesus Christ

[Trump's failing] Election Integrity Commission [...] drew widespread criticism when it emerged into public view by asking for personal information, including addresses, partial social security numbers and party affiliation, on every voter in the country.

It further outraged voters by planning to post that information publicly.

Voters directed that outrage toward the Trump White House and the voter commission, often using profanity-laced language in the 112 pages of emails released this week.

[...]

Unfortunately for these voters and others who wrote in, the Trump administration did not redact any of their personal information from the emails before releasing them to the public. In some cases, the emails contain not only names, but email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers and places of employment of people worried about such information being made available to the public.

[...]

Federal agencies often solicit and release public comments on proposed legislation. Regulations.gov, the federal government's clearing house for public comments, includes a detailed set of guidelines explaining how to submit comments, what type of personal information is collected and how that information may be used.

[...]

The White House does not appear to have issued any such public guidelines or warnings before many of the emails were sent.

  WaPo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Like a Charm

How Embarrassing

 As of Thursday evening, 48 states have refused to turn over private voter data to Trump’s [election integrity] commission. “I’ve been studying America’s election administration since 2000, and I’ve rarely seen a firestorm like this,” wrote MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III.

 Twenty-one states are refusing to give Kobach any data and 27 states are handing over only limited public information on voters (a full list of the states appears below). [...]  Two states have not yet responded. [Hawaii and Nebraska]

[...]

 Also notable is the opposition from members of Trump’s own election commission, like Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, who said, “Indiana law doesn’t permit the Secretary of State to provide the personal information requested by Secretary Kobach,” and Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, who told Kobach, “Upon review, the request is denied.” One member of the commission, Maryland Deputy Secretary of State Luis Borunda, has already resigned.

[...]

 The commission was set up for one purpose—to spread false information about voter fraud, like Trump’s gigantic lie that millions of people voted illegally, in order to build support for policies that make it more difficult to vote.

  The Nation

Doesn't appear to be working. However, I'm inclined to believe the Red States opposition is less that they're against voter suppression and more that they don't want the federal government in their voting business. But, I'll take it however I can get it.

That's a No, Then

Speaking of what's not gonna happen...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Let the Competition Begin

Which state will give the best refusal to comply with Trump's "Election Integrity" Commission?

Mississippi's Secretary of State started it.
 


Kentucky entered the race.

Who's next?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

"Election Integrity Commission" Gets "Hosed"

ht Bradd Jaffy

Nice one.

Election Integrity Czarina Won't Cooperate With Himself

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach will not hand over information to his own commission.

“In Kansas, the Social Security number is not publicly available. … Every state receives the same letter but we’re not asking for it if it’s not publicly available,” Kobach told the Kansas City Star Friday. It was a change in stance from Thursday, the paper reported, when Kobach said Kansas would provide all requested information to the commission.

Kobach added Friday, hedging somewhat: “If the commission decides that they would like to receive Social Security numbers to a secure site in order to remove false positives, then we would have to double check and make sure Kansas law permits.”

  TPM

Is this the most insane administration in the history of the US? I'd be willing to bet on it.

“If Social Security number is not publicly available, and it is not publicly available in most states, then we aren’t requesting it,” he said.

“So why’d you ask for it?” Velshi interjected.

“Well, because, if it is publicly available — if the public can get it — then the commission would like it, too,” Kobach said.

Then let the Commission get it the way anybody else has to.

Also, Commission Chair Mike Pence's state of Indiana essentially told them to fuck off, too.  As did twenty+ other states.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:
Great response from Mississippi's Secretary of State Delbert Hoseman:

Hosed.

UPDATE:  I don't see any fully complying.

Voter Suppression Moving Into High Gear

 Four things happened yesterday that pose a grave danger to voting rights.

[...]

 All four of these actions would be disturbing on their own, but taken together they represent an unprecedented attack on voting rights by the Trump administration and Republican Congress.

[...]

 1. The House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, the only federal agency that helps states make sure their voting machines aren’t hacked.

[...]

 2. The Department of Justice sent a letter to all 50 states informing them that “we are reviewing voter registration list maintenance procedures in each state covered by the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act]” and asking how they plan to remove voters from the rolls. While this might sound banal, it’s a clear instruction to states from the federal government to start purging the voting rolls.

[...]

 3. The White House commission on election integrity, led by vice chair Kris Kobach, also sent a letter to 50 states asking them to provide sweeping voter data including “the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, cancelled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information.”

[...]

4. The Trump administration named Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation as a member of the commission, who’s done more than anyone other than Kobach to spread the myth of voter fraud and enact suppressive policies.

[...]

Let’s be clear what’s happening: Republicans have no desire to prevent another hack from Moscow, but they are dead set on limiting voting rights at home.

  The Nation

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Kentucky, Virginia, I'm Pleasantly Surprised

Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky secretary of state, on Thursday evening said she would not comply with a data request from President Donald Trump’s “election integrity” commission, making Kentucky the third state to reject the request.

[...]

“The president created his election commission based on the false notion that ‘voter fraud’ is a widespread issue — it is not. Indeed, despite bipartisan objections and a lack of authority, the President has repeatedly spread the lie that three to five million illegal votes were cast in the last election,” Grimes said in the statement. “Kentucky will not aid a commotion that is at best a waste of taxpayer money and at worst an attempt to legitimize voter suppression efforts across the country.”

  TPM

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) on Thursday said he has “no intention” of cooperating with President Donald Trump’s sketchy commission to investigate alleged voter fraud.

“I have no intention of honoring this request,” McAuliffe said in a release.

  TPM

California - I'm not surprised. Kudos, though.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla [...] on Thursday refused to send any information from the state’s voter rolls to the dubious “election integrity” commission convened by the Trump administration.

  TPM

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: