The press is calling it the Voter Fraud panel, though it would more accurate to call it the Voter Suppression panel. But the real name of the committee headed by Vice President Mike Pence and anti-immigration, pro-voter suppression Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

Note to Pence and Kobach: The term “election integrity” is already taken. But that never stopped Republicans, who are masters at appropriating other people’s language. Remember when “fake news” referred to patently false stories amplified on the internet to create confusion and disinformation during the campaign? Trump made the term his own, changing its meaning to any news he doesn’t like that comes from the mainstream media. Remember when “No child left behind” was a term coined by Marian Wright Edelman, the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi bar, who worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and founded the Children’s Defense Fund in 1973, who honestly believed no child should be left behind, not only in school, but everywhere in society? Maybe you don’t, but that’s who coined and used the term until George Bush kidnapped it to use for his 2001 education legislation which should have been called “No test left behind.”

Election integrity activists have been fighting to assure that every vote is counted accurately for years. Tucson has been one of the centers of the fight since a group of people who believed the results of the 2006 RTA election had been flipped from a loss to a win started scrutinizing the county’s voting and vote counting procedures. Whether the group’s allegations are right or wrong, we’ve all benefited from their work to make Pima County elections far more tamper resistant than they were in the past. As they and others across the country have demonstrated, rigging an election to change the results isn’t rocket science. It can be accomplished fairly easily by any number of actors starting in the polling booth and ending with the final vote count if no one is paying attention. I haven’t seen any slam dunk evidence of a vote count being hacked, but there are lots of wisps of smoke in elections around the country. Given the political stakes, it’s hard to believe no one has made an attempt to falsify the count to turn a loss into a win over the past few years.

Trump’s misnamed Commission on Election Integrity doesn’t plan to look at shoring up the defenses against people manipulating the vote count. It wants to purge the voter rolls of as many minority and low income voters as it can and add layers of voter ID requirements and other regulations to decrease the number of Democratic voters. They say they want to combat voter fraud—after all, according to Trump he only lost the popular vote because 3 million people voted illegally—but the incidence of voter fraud is so small it approaches zero.

We now have a new and very real threat to the integrity of our elections. We know the Russian government actively interfered in the last presidential election with the purpose of either electing Donald Trump or making Hillary Clinton and her victory so suspect that the U.S. would be seriously weakened. We know they targeted state election systems in 39 states and successfully hacked into some of them. We know they cyber-attacked a voting software supplier. With the information the Russian government has gathered and the possibility of a continuing presence inside state’s election systems, at the very least they can create confusion on election day which could sway results. And we don’t know for sure they haven’t found their way into the actual touchscreen voting machines and the computers that tally the results, both of which would allow them to change vote counts with a few key strokes.

This is what the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity should be looking into. It should send out computer forensics experts to search through voter databases as well as the software in individual voting machines and vote tallying computers to see if they can find evidence of tampering. It should get rid of any computer voting system without a paper trail, where voters plug their choices into a machine and never see a paper printout, and there are no paper ballots to audit after the election to determine whether or not the vote count is accurate. And they should help states institute rigorous post-election audits which will be thorough enough to detect manipulation of the vote count. Even if there were no Russian threat to our elections, all of those steps should be taken. Instead the Trump administration is determined to use the committee to rig elections by suppressing the Democratic vote.

This article appears in Jul 6-12, 2017.

27 replies on “There’s Election Integrity, and Then There’s Election Integrity”

  1. The use of euphemisms or benign titles to carryout nefarious acts has a long history around the world and in America.

    Who can forget “lebensraum” (living space) — one of the so-called justifications for Nazi Germany to seize and occupy neighboring nations in Europe, or “citizens united” — which removed any hindrance to the open buying and selling of elected officials?

    And speaking of Nazi Germany and the collection of personal information and political affiliations, may I present “The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.”

  2. Being against illegal immigration, or wanting to reduce immigration to more historically normal levels, doesn’t make you “anti-immigration”. Dishonesty in the media today is just astounding.

  3. “It should get rid of any computer voting system without a paper trail” — yes, this. Every computer system is hackable.

  4. There are about 20M non-citizens of voting age in this country. We should probably figure out how many of those people are illegally voting in our elections. And frankly, there’s more evidence of non-citizen voting than there is of voting machines being hacked to change the vote count. No, Diebold did not steal the 2000 election for George W. Bush.

  5. Seems like you’re assuming, David, that your party has some kind of monopoly on the “clean” or “honest” use of terms like “electoral integrity.” But of the two major parties, it’s the “Democrats” who are more out of alignment these days with their own supposedly “democratic” electoral goals, putting them in a situation where to accomplish their ACTUAL goals they must constantly dissemble and dress their real goals up in language that conceals what they are. Of the two parties, their public language surrounding electoral politics is, in general, more dishonest.

    The Rs do what they’ve always done and always claimed to do, represent the interests of capital: the wealthy, business owners, financiers and corporate executives, and that should be no surprisie. They imply in the title of their party (Republican) that they believe that some are better qualified to make governance decisions than others, and from their practice when it comes to the management of access to voting, it appears that they may tend to generalize that attitude a little further, to cover fitness for enfranchisement, not just fitness for governance. It outrages Democrats, but it’s consistent with their overall clearly expressed outlook and goals. The Democrats, on the other hand, imply in the title of their party that everyone deserves a seat at the table and everyone’s vote deserves to be counted. Yet when it comes to primary contests, which, as Lessig has repeatedly pointed out, are a critical part of getting governance to democratically reflect the policy priorities of the electorate, they stack the deck with Superdelegates and primaries in which Independents cannot vote. Then, if the electoral college undermines them in the general election, a circumstance greater proportions of the population observe and understand than the more “under the radar” manipulations in the primaries, they hypocritically protest how unfair and un-democratic it is.

    The question that occurs to me frequently these days is: why should I believe a word the Ds say any more, on any subject? They tell us they want to help immigrants when there are many indications they’re actually serving the interests of capital by diluting the labor pool, suppressing wages. They tell us they want to help borrowers when a thorough examination of their policy proposals would seem to suggest they’re again serving the interests of capital by in effect enabling irresponsible banks to give out bad loans and then bail themselves out with taxpayer-sourced funds. They tell us they’re against outsourcing while they outsource vulnerable labor pools and try to hide the fact that they’ve done so in public forums. More of same. They tell us they’re for integration while they tolerate, excuse, and enable segregated public school systems which deliver poor services to low-SES minorities and superior services to high-SES Anglo-majority populations, a blatant and inexcusable violation of the kinds of ideals the party has managed to stand for in past decades.

    I donated to, walked for, phone banked for, and voted for Democratic candidates for decades. It was watching, at both the local and national level, the electoral cycle leading up to November 2016 that brought me face to face with what the Democrats have become. You know, little things like catching local Democratic operatives in conspicuous lies and watching their local and national media lapdogs blather on about Trump, Trump, Trump ad infinitum, ad NAUSEAM while reps of the party opposing Trump busily sold their laboring constituents down the river to their corporate masters, kicked grass-roots funded candidates to the curb, and funded the campaigns they favored almost entirely with money from special interests. Out of town corporate donations for the TUSD Board elections. Wall Street money for that great defender of labor and the consumer, Ms. Clinton, while she and her cronies in the DNC and “unbiased” media outlets like the NYTimes schemed to undercut and disparage Sanders, her grass-roots funded primary opponent, a seasoned public servant who happened to be a much more genuine and credible defender of the interests of labor and the consumer than she was.

    Bottom line is the outraged citizen response you’re looking for vis a vis the opposing party’s behaviors, schemes, and definitions of terms simply cannot be there for you, David, when the conflict between the parties is no longer, as it used to be to some degree, between capital and labor, business interests vs. the Common Good, but rather what it has become: special interest cohort A vs. special interest cohort B. Vanilla flavored capital vs. rainbow flavored capital.

    Ordinary citizens have little reason to back either one, and, as was pointed out above, neither has much credibility when we’re talking about “electoral integrity” in the properly democratic (not “Democratic”) sense of the term.

  6. Our Democracy, as any Democracy, is inherently contentious in the competition of Political Ideologies; initially with the Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists; now with, in the main, Democrats vs. Republicans. We have developed, sadly and dangerously, into a “Democracy” that is controlled by powerful Financial Interests Groups that are using their money to “buy” “Politicians” and, as a result, control the electoral process.

    The American Voter needs to wake up and participate in the electoral process at all levels of Government; critically evaluate each Candidate, using their notion of what is in the best interests of all US Citizens and their Understanding of our Constitutionally Protected Liberties. We will lose the latter if we do not.

    The question is: as a car driving toward a precipice; are we at the fulcrum or have we moved beyond? The Election of Donald Trump is NOT Hopeful and dangerously symptomatic.

  7. To what extent will a substantially inequitable economic base always subvert a theoretically equitable political / electoral superstructure built on it?

    “The market measures influence in dollars, while a democracy, in principle, measure votes. In practice, at some level of inequality, the dollars infect and overwhelm the votes. Reasonable people can disagree about the levels of inequality that a democracy can tolerate without becoming an utter charade. My judgment is that we have been in the ‘charade zone’ for quite some time.”

    James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale

  8. Then what did you call the election of Barack Obama, who by all accounts had missed the majority of votes, never run a business, or proposed a piece of legislation, opposed same sex marriage, and touted Christianity as “his” faith?

    The Democratic Party dumped Hillary to present us a candidate who was not exactly as he said. Yet voters fell for the hope and change schtick. You were not bothered. Trump comes along and tells us exactly who he is. Enough Americans can look past his flaws and give him an electoral college win. Even in the face of major corporations, the mainstream media, most American colleges and even the Republican party.

    I would say you are unable to give voters the credit that they deserve. The nation will survive and possibly thrive the next eight years.

  10. I’m an independent, non-aligned voter veering between progressive and libertarian. In the past election, I was chastised for refusing to vote for Clinton (or for that matter, Trump).

    Here’s my beef with the Democrats (I have seen the enemy and they are Republicans): decide if you (Dems) want an open party or a members-only club. Open parties hold open primaries – everyone is invited, let’s boogie!. Members-only clubs want to see your ID or inked wrist before admitting you to the dance.

    Eliminate and disavow Superdelegates. This will gain points from folks who believe in one person, one vote – a quaint notion. While eliminating the obvious references to Orwell’s “some animals (the pigs) are more equal than other animals.”

    Stop taking truckloads of donations from the folks you promise to rein in and impose new regulations on. It makes you look stupid or deceitful (pick your poison). And for goodness sake, don’t take millions in speaker’s fees from the same folks because “that is what they offered.”

    The Dems screwed the pooch bigtime, they nominated (with an assist from the DNC) the only candidate on the planet capable of losing an election for POTUS to the biggest and worst joke to ever run for the office in our history.

    Ever.

  11. Kobach’s commission’s job is fact find. That’s all. What he wants to do is to cross check the names of registered voters against a list of known non-citizens (i.e., visa holders, permanent residents, and known illegal aliens). The only people who would object to this project are those who think that’s ok to register non-citizens to illegally vote in our elections.

    The typical response to this concern is, “Non-citizen vote fraud doesn’t happen.” But we know it happens to some degree. Here’s an example of someone going to jail for it. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/us/ille… Moreover, we can’t know the degree to which it happens until we do the analysis that Kobach is proposing. Finally, there has never been a documented case of the vote count from an electronic voting machine being changed due to hacking, ever. Yet, Safier and fellow travelers seem to think that the electronic security of the voting process is a serious problem that has to be addressed. If electronic security of voting machines, a potential problem, is deserving of consideration (and it is), than so is the other potential problem of illegal non-citizen voting.

  12. There is a good reason the states are responsible for conducting elections. There is no good reason for political hacks at the federal level to get involved. Remember “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you?”

  13. Rick Spanier, can I assume that you’re opposed to DOJ lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act, then?

  14. Then why do we look to the government to “repair” our healthcare? Get them out of the market and let market forces dictate costs.

  15. Nathan

    I am opposed to this administration having access to all voter information from all states including social security identifiers and party affiliation and storing it securely in an unidentified location (Kobach’s big oops). I would be similarly opposed to a Democratic administration following the same path.

    And no, you can’t assume I am opposed to DOJ lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act. That is a legitimate area of concern as the Republicans continue to struggle to deny voting rights to their presumed enemies.

    This nonsense from Trump-Pence-Kobach is a lame defense of the ridiculous claim that 3 million illegals voted against Trump in ’16. Only the dumbest of the dumb is buying into that lie and defending Trump’s latest brain fart. That train will never leave the station. Money better spent on the latest border wall, you know, the transparent one with solar panels that will pay for itself.

  16. Rick,

    Arizona already sells access to its voter registration database for $500, which includes party preference, although not the last four digits of one’s SSN. Withholding SSNs from the U.S. federal government, the entity that issues them, seems odd. And why would you be opposed to secure storage of the information?

    The liberal resistance to Kobach’s project seems very fishy. You people insist, without evidence, that non-citizen voting doesn’t happen, yet you all support obstructing an investigation that would prove or disprove that claim.

    It’s almost as if something’s being hidden, intentionally.

  17. Why am I opposed to amassing all voter information in one database secured by the US government? Because that same government has had a dismal track record of maintaining the integrity of the massive databases it has responsibility for protecting. Because the Trump administration is incompetent and focused on revenge and retaliation. Because I would not trust an administration headed by Hillary Clinton any more than I would the current administration. Because the Republicans seek to deny voting rights to their perceived enemies while Democrats have used the IRS against their perceived enemies. Because I believe our electoral process is resides with the states not the federal government. We are a republic, remember, and the founders were a hell of a lot smarter than me, or you.

  18. The founding fathers were a lot smarter than either of us. We are a republic for a reason. Their distrust of an all powerful federal government made sense then and today. Donald Trump can’t understand that because he obviously has not read or understood the Constitution and is convinced he is the smartest guy on Earth.

    He is not even in the right hand side of the bell curve measuring intelligence. He is somewhere in the shallows on the left side. I will stay with our founders and the Constitution. Thank you.

  22. Forget Hillary. She lost the election and does not matter anymore.

    I do not understand continuing support for Trump when so many lies are proven, and “Yes, I do,” accept responsible journalism over Trump Tweets.

    So try: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/0…

    If you refuse to believe these examples, then keep voting for the man and all he represents.

  23. Hillary does matter. She and the faction within the Democratic Party she represents are responsible for the 2016 presidential election results. So when you roll your eyes over Trump’s idiocies, remember to thank her. And the DNC. And the NYTimes, that bastion of impartial journalism that treated the Sanders campaign in a very biased, profoundly dishonest way.

    It is clear to anyone who has been paying attention that the power players in the Democratic Party have been enablers of the financial sector’s malfeasance in this country. Their “solution” to the 2008 crisis — bailing the banks out at taxpayer expense and failing to prosecute those responsible for the sub-prime loan debacle — was an unbelievably corrupt betrayal of people who work for a living in this country. To most citizens, money is not a toy they gamble with. It is what they use to keep a roof over their family’s head, to feed and clothe and educate their children. To crater their home values and then use their tax funds to bail criminals in the banking system out, while jacking up the cost of higher ed and asking the children of the middle class to indenture themselves to the banks to get qualified for professions is a profound and unacceptable betrayal of the citizens whose labor keeps this country and its institutions running.

    Many noticed, and many were unwilling to vote for someone as obviously tied to the damage to their wellbeing as Hillary Clinton was. The remedy for your dismay is to take a good, hard look at the Democratic Party and ask it to clean itself up. Not to piss and moan about Trump. He is not the root of the problem. He wouldn’t have been able to get into the presidency if the Democrats had not failed so miserably, from the Bill Clinton deregulation-and corporate-enabling presidency on, to defend the interests of ordinary citizens.

  24. …and here’s a 7/24/2017 update on the Democratic agenda from none other than Chuck Schumer, in an Op Ed in the NYTimes:

    “Americans are clamoring for bold changes to our politics and our economy. They feel, rightfully, that both systems are rigged against them, and they made that clear in last years election. American families deserve a better deal so that this country works for everyone again, not just the elites and special interests. Today, Democrats will start presenting that better deal to the American people.”

    He goes on to list the lame band-aid policy solutions his party proposes to put on the gaping wounds in this country, policy solutions which do NOT happen to include developing a single payer health care system, putting reasonable limits on the costs of higher education, or properly regulating the banking system. His approach insults the intelligence of the American public and cheapens the value of words in our public discourse ever further, if that is even possible anymore.

    Here are excerpts from some of the top “readers’ pick” comments on the article:

    “And how about health care? Will the Dems fight for Single Payer, which virtually all analysts agree is the only way to provide reasonably priced health care for all Americans?”

    “There’s an easy solution: follow the Bernie Sanders plan. The Democrats are too close to Wall Street, K Street lobbyists, the ultra rich, and the very forces responsible for the current predicament. It’s a contradiction and frankly, corruption – you can’t be a people’s party with close ties to Wall Street. I would go to say that it is an outright betrayal of the New Deal.”

    “Sounds like more of the same Rube Goldberg-like ideas which brought us the AcA.”

    “It is hard to believe that this program will be able to gain traction in a Congress whose members depend on contributions from the wealthy to gain office. To reorient the government to work on behalf of the people, we need election finance reform.”

    “Chuck Schumer, this is a very thin broth you are offering to hardworking Americans starving for a better future for their children and grandchildren:
    – The only mention of affordable healthcare are controls on the pharmaceutical industry?
    – We need to continue to respect and protect the environment
    – The inordinate roll of special interest Big Money needs to end
    – The US needs to regain supremacy in energy and transportation technology and the jobs to support it.
    – We need to create meaningful, challenging jobs to fill the massive void left by productivity improvements
    The loss of farming and manufacturing jobs, primarily due to technological changes which drastically reduced the workforce, compounded by the, outosurcing of employment and stagnant wages has left the bulk of employment in rural areas in the low paying, low benefit and SHRINKING retail sector. This is not a viable future for our people. Democratics need a sharper vision than this lame “Better Deal”.”

    “Today’s three big ideas to help American workers are: (1) asking venture capitalists why they want higher drug prices, (2) making corporate mergers more complicated, and (3) giving tax breaks to businesses? Senator, with plans like these, the leadership of the Democratic Party must be trying to ensure that Republicans retain control of Congress after 2018. This plan does nothing that will convince workaday Americans that you’ve learned anything from your time in the political wilderness.”

    In short, the majority of “Readers Pick” comments give a good indication that the majority of NYTimes readers know the difference between what the Democratic Party found itself able to stand for in the past (e.g. the “New Deal”) and this so-called “Better Deal.” (What is that, “Better Deal”? A shortening of the full-length title, “An incredibly lame policy agenda that is still a Better Deal than what Trump and the plutocrats will offer you”? Not buying it. Have had enough of bad and worse, in a context where the only legitimate selling point of of “bad” is it’s “better than worse.”)

    The Democratic Party, if it cannot do BETTER than this, will find itself about where the “Know Nothings” are today: nowhere, with no base, no credibility, no Presidency, no majority in Congress or the House, the NOTHING party they have chosen to make themselves with their corporate donations and their special-interest-pandering agenda. Complain about Trump all you like: a lot of people realize that THE DEMOCRATS are the ones who, by selling out and abandoning their natural role in the American dialogue and their natural constituency, left labor at the mercy of the false promises made by and scraps tossed from the table of Trump and his ilk.

  25. …and that is a lot like OJ saying he just bought a big knife and he wants to date your daughter. No mas por favor! Mucho el floppo.

  26. It is apparent (to me, at least) that the biggest problem facing the Democrats is not Trump and his “agenda” (it changes hourly). It is not the Republican congress. The biggest problem facing the Democrats is the Democratic Party and its leadership. I read Schumer’s nonsense this morning and came away convinced the Dems are poised, once again, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. When your team is in last place with the longest losing streak in history, it is time to shake things up beginning with management and begin building a farm team with solid recruits.

  27. Hillary was terrible candidate and that is true. She was not liked for a long time. The media and SNL and RW radio and blog-monsters have been mocking her since the 1990s without letting up, and I am so glad she is off the stage and makes very little or no news at all these days. She is a dead letter politically, with no chances at running again. Now it’s Trump’s turn. He makes news every day all day. And he lies. He lies about small matters and he lies about important issues and he lies about people and he stifles the truth with more lies. I guess what bothers me the most these days is that when someone informs some Trump supporters that the man tells lies, they take it personally, as if they are being attacked. Well, that’s a shame because Trump is still a liar. The Democrats know it. The Republicans know it. His pants are on fire all the time and, without the Constitution’s balance of powers, he will burn our house down.

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