Trump’s National Vote Suppression Commission
By 
Democracy is fundamentally inconsistent with the interests of Donald Trump and the Republican Party more broadly, and they’d like less of it:
To understand why Kobach’s presence on this panel is so alarming, you need to know his background. The architect of draconian anti-immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama—as well as the mind behind Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” rhetoric—Kobach has been a prominent champion for voting restrictions. In the aftermath of 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Supreme Court struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act, Kobach emerged as a major voice for voter suppression. He has backed strict ID laws and pushed for states to require a birth certificate or passport for registration, measures that primarily burden low-income voters, including many voters of color. From his perch as Kansas’ top election official, Kobach has launched a crusade against “illegal voting,” winning power from state lawmakers to prosecute “voting crime.” In keeping with most studies of voter fraud—which find little to no evidence of its existence—Kobach has found just nine cases of alleged fraud out of 1.8 million registered Kansas voters.
By making Kobach a co-chair for this commission, Trump has announced its actual purpose: to impose new strict requirements for voting and registration under the guise of “election integrity.” And while the commission may include Democrats, Kobach’s presence robs it of any credibility. It is a farce.
It is important to say that Kobach isn’t unique in his drive for voting restrictions and that Trump’s obsession with illegal voting reflects the behavior of Republicans across the country. In states like Alabama, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers have slashed ballot access and pushed for tough identification laws. These laws fall hardest on voters with the least resources, who disproportionately are black and Latino. In the cases of North Carolina and Texas, federal courts have found that these laws were designed to disadvantage voters of color. Last year, for example, a federal court in Richmond, Virginia, found that North Carolina’s voter ID law “targets African Americans with almost surgical precision.” What we may see from Trump’s commission, then, are national variations on state-level Republican ideas, all of which are designed to shrink the pool of people who participate in our democracy.
Republicans want to make it harder for people to vote for obvious reasons:
Prior to the 2016 election, Eddie Lee Holloway Jr., a 58-year-old African-American man, moved from Illinois to Wisconsin, which implemented a strict voter-ID law for the first time in 2016. He brought his expired Illinois photo ID, birth certificate, and Social Security card to get a photo ID for voting in Wisconsin, but the DMV in Milwaukee rejected his application because the name on his birth certificate read “Eddie Junior Holloway,” the result of a clerical error when it was issued. Holloway ended up making seven trips to different public agencies in two states and spent over $200 in an attempt to correct his birth certificate, but he was never able to obtain a voter ID in Wisconsin. Before the election, his lawyer for the ACLU told me Holloway was so disgusted he left Wisconsin for Illinois.
Holloway’s story was sadly familiar in 2016. According to federal court records, 300,000 registered voters, 9 percent of the electorate, lacked strict forms of voter ID in Wisconsin. A new study by Priorities USA, shared exclusively with The Nation, shows that strict voter-ID laws, in Wisconsin and other states, led to a significant reduction in voter turnout in 2016, with a disproportionate impact on African-American and Democratic-leaning voters. Wisconsin’s voter-ID law reduced turnout by 200,000 votes, according to the new analysis. Donald Trump won the state by only 22,748 votes.
The lesson of Wisconsin, needless to say, is that we should maintain a laser-like focus on the not very important resource allocation decisions of someone who will never run for president again — after all, it’s hard to see Republican vote suppression being much of an issue in future elections.