Voting rights clampdown??

Drumpf tweets stoke fears of voting rights clampdown

By Katie Glueck

Donald Drumpf’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud are alarming voting rights activists who fear broader ballot access crackdowns — and his remarks are also emboldening groups that champion more stringent voting requirements.

The president-elect took to Twitter on Sunday to baselessly tee off on “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California,” and to misleadingly assert without evidence that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Independent election experts say those claims are false, and advocates for expanded voting access fear that such comments will further motivate some conservatives to push for more barriers to the ballot.

“The false notion that voter fraud is something that we are contending with in our country is an invitation for lawmakers to act,” warned Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit organization that is a leader of the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition, which includes several labor unions aligned with Democrats.

In addition to taking the White House and maintaining control of Capitol Hill, Republicans racked up bigger majorities in state legislatures and took on new governorships on Nov. 8, giving some conservative groups and lawmakers that want to push for stricter voting requirements more avenues for doing so. In New Hampshire, for example, incoming Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who took over from Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan, has already said he wants to get rid of Election Day registration.

Activists and voting rights experts fear that Drumpf has motivated anti-voter fraud groups to recommit to legislative pushes on the issue. It’s a commitment that these experts say is misplaced, arguing that there are few real instances of fraud.

“At the state level, the worries are, when the president-elect is claiming massive voter fraud, people who are unscrupulously seeking to push politically motivated restrictions will jump on those statements, and use them to justify efforts to roll back voting rights even further,” said Wendy Weiser, an expert on voting rights and the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center of Justice at New York University School of Law. “That is a concern.”

There was already a major push beginning in 2011 to enact more stringent voter ID laws by Republican-controlled statehouses across the country. Some of those efforts were quashed in court. But Democrats and some nonpartisan voting experts say that in states like North Carolina, where early voting access was curtailed and problems at polling sites continued through Election Day, minority communities were disproportionately affected, bolstering Drumpf’s lead in the state.

True the Vote, a tea party-aligned, officially nonpartisan organization that has been ringing alarm bells about voter fraud for years, cheered Drumpf’s tweets.

“True the Vote absolutely supports President-elect Drumpf’s recent comment about the impact of illegal voting, as reflected in the national popular vote,” read a statement from the organization.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of True the Vote, said in an interview that she expects Drumpf’s estimate of “millions” of illegal votes cast to ultimately prove accurate.

“I think when all the dust settles, that is absolutely what we’re going to find,” she said, arguing that “there are too many contributing factors, too few securities, too much intentional subversion of the process on display.”

She said she supports expanded voter ID measures, though she stressed that she wants to make it easier for people to obtain identification.

“I am very encouraged that we will have an opportunity, in this new administration, to have a national discussion about election integrity, and how we can work together, from voters, the states and the federal level, to make sure elections are free and fair,” she said.

To voting rights experts who believe the process is already ‘free and fair,” those are chilling comments — and Drumpf’s Cabinet picks and potential further hires are also hardly reassuring.

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Drumpf’s choice for attorney general, was involved, in the 1980s, in the unsuccessful prosecution of African-American civil rights activists in Alabama on allegations of voter fraud. He went on to be rejected by a Republican-controlled Senate committee for a federal judgeship, in part over concerns about racial prejudice. His record on civil rights is hotly contested, but voting rights activists point to his Alabama record in citing concerns over how he might act as attorney general. Representatives for the Drumpf transition didn’t respond to a request for comment, though Drumpf has praised Sessions as a “world-class legal mind.”

“There have been real issues raised in the past regarding Mr. Sessions’ racial sensitivity, questions about his hostility towards minority groups and questions about his positions on the very laws he would be tasked with enforcing as attorney general,” Clarke said.

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has already expressed concerns over how Sessions would handle the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, though other senators — including some who have been critical of Drumpf in the past — have indicated that they will back Sessions, who is already wooing his colleagues ahead of confirmation hearings.

Another name stoking concern in the voting rights community: Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and anti-illegal immigration hardliner, who has been mentioned as a possible member of Drumpf’s Cabinet. During a meeting with Drumpf earlier this month, he was spotted holding a document titled “Department of Homeland Security; Kobach strategic plan for first 365 days.” “Stop aliens from voting,” one line appeared to say. Kobach, the architect of Arizona’s hard-line immigration law, has also been at the center of the fight to demand voters prove citizenship, an approach rejected in federal court.

“He has been a real proponent of laws cutting back on voting access,” Weiser said of Kobach, pointing to the courts as a bulwark against what she sees as more “extreme” measures that have been pushed over the last several years. “He’s done really extreme efforts to require documentary proof of citizenship.”

Clarke, whose organization has been involved in litigation opposing Kobach’s efforts, added, “I am deeply concerned by suggestions that he may be a nominee for a key position in this next administration.”