Why we should be very afraid of Trumps vote suppression commission

[Gothmog]

54. NYT-Happy Fourth of July! Show Us Your Papers

This is a great editorial https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/opinion/voter-fraud-data-kris-kobach.html

The reviews of President Trump’s new commission on election integrity are rolling in, and they’re not good.

“Disingenuous.” “Repugnant.” “At best a waste of taxpayer money.” “A tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.”

State officials across the country responded to the commission’s slapdash request last week for detailed voter data in the manner previously reserved for emailed pleas from a Nigerian prince.

Delete, said secretaries of state in Kentucky, Minnesota, Tennessee, California — more than 20 states refused to comply, red and blue and every hue in between. “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico,” Mississippi’s secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, responded.....

The better question is what Mr. Trump and his allies so desperately hope to find. Remember that the commission was reverse-engineered to provide a veneer of legitimacy to Mr. Trump’s bogus claims that millions of noncitizens voted in 2016 — his explanation for losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost three million. (One would think that sitting in the Oval Office might have eased his pain.) But the circumstances of its creation are secondary to its real goal — to make voting harder for millions of Americans, on the understanding that Republicans win more elections when fewer people vote. According to the election-law expert Rick Hasen, the commission will probably aim to roll back parts of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the motor-voter law, which has registered millions of voters.

The real problem, of course, isn’t fraud. It’s low turnout — in a good year, nearly half of all eligible American citizens fail to vote. As the nation marks 241 years of independence, the most pressing voting issue should be getting those tens of millions of nonparticipating Americans registered and to the polls, so that their voices can be heard. If the paranoid voter-fraud crusaders devoted a fraction of their inquisitorial energy to solving that vexing problem, now that would be something to celebrate.