How Trump-Kobach voter purge will claim a phony win

The Donald Trump-Kris Kobach Presidential Advisory Commission on Ways to Disenfranchise Potential Democratic Voters is off to a rocky start because:

▪ At least 44 Secretaries of State across the nation say they cannot or will not cooperate in full with Kobach’s request for detailed, even private, information on their state’s voters.

▪ Republicans once again have bumbled their way into a logical contradiction: the party that lives by the credo of states rights is using presidential authority to intrude into one of the most jealously guarded state rights: overseeing their own elections.

▪ Chasing “massive” voter fraud, according to dozens of more-rigorous and finer-grained studies than the one the commission can do, is a wild goose chase.

▪ Kobach, its vice-chairman and de-facto leader under Vice President Mike Pence, has politically and legally botched virtually every effort he has undertaken in Kansas and in advising other states about combatting the imagined flood of illegal voting. Al Capone won more court cases than Kobach.

The DT-KKPACWDPDV has zero chance of fulfilling its secondary goal: making Trump’s seven million loss in the 2016 popular vote count look somewhat better on paper. (Yes, it was a seven-million-vote loss: Hillary Clinton received almost three million more votes than Trump, and four million people voted for someone else altogether, including the Libertarian candidate—two million—and miscellaneous real and fictional write-ins—another two million.)

At least some of the data Kobach asked for is public and available digitally to anyone in most states, but the inviolable first rule of computerized data still applies: garbage in, garbage out.

What the commission will wind up with is a snapshot of a national work in progress at 3,144 U.S. county election offices. Those offices, large and small, work daily to keep their voter-registration rolls current by tracking deaths, changes of address, felony convictions and other ordinary human activities that affect voter status. It’s a huge job which some counties do better than others.

Counties coordinate, even across state lines, and compare databases, seeking duplications and other abnormalities. When they spot them, they follow a multi-step process to clean up the rolls. But in a highly mobile nation of 320 million people, the demographics change minute by hour by day, and a snapshot can be misleading. On any given day, for instance, almost two million dead people are still registered.

The complexity and fluidity of the data guarantees that, once the commission crunches it, there will be a pseudo-stunning announcement—drum roll please—that “there are millions of suspect voter registrations with the potential to support fraud.” That’s not at all what Trump and Kobach have been claiming but will be used by them to justify broadening their efforts to disenfranchise people who fit their stereotype of Democratic voters: people of color, welfare “takers,” immigrants and the like.

Unbiased experts and local voter registration officials have always known about that problem, but they are able to distinguish between the potential for voter fraud and actual, executed fraud, which is virtually non-existent.

There is every reason for all citizens to expect fair elections, to not have their votes neutralized by unqualified voters, and to have faith in the process. And they do, in fact, have all of the above.

But the DT-KKPACWDPDV has other goals.

This story was originally published July 11, 2017 at 5:04 AM with the headline "How Trump-Kobach voter purge will claim a phony win."