Trump’s Voter Suppression Commission—

Disenfranchising Millions in Service of White Supremacy and Fascism

September 11, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

America, Summer of 2017: Open white supremacist thugs take to the streets to restore their “heritage” of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow discrimination, while in Washington, DC, a more well-heeled team of fascists—the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity—meets and plans in modern offices, spearheading another front in the same fascist project.

Why I Am Not Voting In This Election, Why You Shouldn't Either...
But Why I Will Defend The Right Of Black And Other Oppressed People To Vote!

By Carl Dix

Commission Head Kris Kobach: Suppressing the Vote in the Name of Western Civilization

Why was Kris Kobach put in charge of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity?

Kobach is part of the Christian fascist cabal in the Trump/Pence regime, along with Vice President Mike Pence. Among other things, he’s a major advocate of the claim that this country was founded as a “Christian country”; he attacks same-sex marriage and gays in general; and he hosted prayer meetings at his Kansas secretary of state office.

Credit: opitslinkfest.blogspot.com

Kobach publicly supported Trump’s fraudulent claim of voter fraud: “I think the president-elect is absolutely correct when he says the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the popular vote margin between him and Hillary Clinton at this point.” But his “qualifications” go way beyond just fawning on Trump.

As secretary of state in Kansas (2011-17), Kobach was on the cutting edge of voter suppression. Besides his unsuccessful hunt for “illegal immigrant voters” (see main article), Kobach introduced “Birth Link,” a system where voter names were cross-referenced with Kansas birth records, meaning any voter who had moved to Kansas (such as immigrants) was automatically suspect. He pushed through one of the strictest voter ID laws in the U.S., which led to one in seven new registrants being rejected.

He also established the “Crosscheck” program, supposedly to remove people who were registered in more than one state. According to a 2016 study of Crosscheck, “200 legitimate voters may be impeded from voting for every double vote stopped.” (New York Times Magazine, June 13, 2017) Ultimately many of his measures were struck down by the courts, which found that 18,000 legal voters had been denied the right to vote.

This fanatical hunt for nonexistent voter fraud looks like lunacy, but it is lunacy, and policy, in pursuit of a definite fascist ideology and program that Kobach has fought for his whole adult life. Kobach studied at Harvard University (1984-87), where he was a protégé of professor Samuel Huntington, a prominent intellectual who argues that a superior “Western Civilization” (i.e., white Christian Europeans) is in an existential battle with the (non-white, non-Christian) “East.”

Huntington applies this same racist thinking to oppressed people within the U.S. In 1975, Huntington wrote, “Some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy.” He argued that “Marginal social groups, as in the case of the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political system. Yet the danger of overloading the political system with demands which extend its functions and undermine its authority still remains.”

As to Latinos, in 1996 Huntington wrote: “While Muslims pose the immediate problem to Europe, Mexicans pose the problem for the United States.” And, “the large and continuing influx of Hispanics threatens the pre-eminence of white Anglo-Protestant culture and the place of English as the only national language. White nativist movements are a possible and plausible response to these trends.” Writing in 2001 in Foreign Policy, he said: “Demographically, socially and culturally, the reconquista [reconquest] of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway.”

With this ideological foundation, Kobach went on to become an operative for the racist anti-immigrant movement. In 2004, he became an attorney for FAIR (Federation for American Immigrant Reform), which opposes all immigration (legal or “illegal”) because it believes this will threaten white domination. FAIR’s founder, John Tanton, writing about the growth of the nonwhite population in the U.S., asked, “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”

FAIR also received $600,000 in grants from the Pioneer Fund, an organization that claims nonwhite people are genetically inferior to whites. FAIR itself is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Yet when pressed on all this while running for Congress in 2003, Kobach refused to repudiate Tanton or FAIR, even though it may have cost him the election.

In 2009, he was hired by then-sheriff/still-fascist-bigot Joe Arpaio to train his sheriffs, and also represented Arpaio when he was sued for racial profiling. In 2010, Kobach played a major role in drafting anti-immigration legislation in Arizona. Arpaio then campaigned for Kobach when he ran for secretary of state in Kansas.

So Kobach’s crusade around “voter fraud” corresponds to the view that the growth of nonwhite populations in the U.S. is a major threat, and that dealing with this requires marginalizing these populations, denying them even the illusion of political power (which might lead them to “overload the system with demands ... and undermine its authority”), and whipping up “white nativist movements” as a way to suppress them.

This commission is officially headed by the Christian fascist vice president, Mike Pence, but the on-the-ground leader is Kris Kobach, former Kansas secretary of state (see sidebar).

Most people first heard about this commission in July, when its demand for extensive voting data, including detailed personal information, sparked public outrage and opposition among the rulers (see below).

This opening act pointed to the commission’s barely disguised mission: to prevent millions of Black people and naturalized citizens,¹ as well as Latinos in general, poor people and young people, from voting. This is a major component of the Trump/Pence regime’s drive to once again reduce Black and Brown people to a semi-official status as second-class citizens, persons who are not fully human or deserving of all the rights of other people. In this respect, these attacks are a dangerous step towards ethnic cleansing, or even outright genocide.

Second, in the current context, where the fascist section of the bourgeoisie (grouped around the Trump/Pence regime) is encountering opposition from the non-fascist section, disenfranchising whole sections of the masses who are inclined to vote for that non-fascist section is an important way that the fascist regime fully consolidates power, making sure that, to the greatest extent possible, only those forces who are fully down with the fascist program will have any position of power or influence in society and in the state apparatus.

“Millions of Illegal Voters”—A Straight-up Lie from the Liar-in-Chief

This commission was initially formed to validate Trump’s claim that “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” and that “3 to 5 million illegal immigrants voted.” In that respect, it is both a way to try and “legitimize” Trump’s thoroughly il-legitimate regime, and another way to criminalize immigrants, Latinos, and Black people, so that even the supposed “civic duty” of voting becomes something sinister—if you are Black or Brown!

Trump’s claims of massive fraud are absurd—there is virtually no illegal individual voting in U.S. elections.² One study looked at every federal election between 2000 and 2014, and found 31 (unproven) allegations of in-person voter fraud—out of over one billion votes cast. Kobach himself doggedly sought to prosecute voting by undocumented immigrants in his home state of Kansas, leading to exactly one conviction!

Undeterred by facts, Trump and a whole cadre of fascist commentators use deception to keep this myth going. Trump proclaimed that “dead people are registered to vote,” and that “you have people registered in two states.” That’s true, because when your loved one dies, few people think “I better make sure she is removed from the voting rolls”! Likewise, when people move and register in a new state, they rarely unregister in their old state.

The question is not whether dead people are registered, but are they actually showing up to vote. And the answer is a resounding NO! The few reports of “dead people” voting turned out to be people who died after casting “absentee” or “early voting” ballots. There is simply no evidence of a significant level—much less millions—of individuals voting illegally.

This brazen dishonesty aims not just to legitimize Trump’s authority, but also to create public opinion for a systematic national attack on the voting rights of Black and Brown people and others.

Such attacks are already taking place, on a state-by-state basis. (See “The State by State Campaign to Strip Away Voting Rights” below at right.) Laws to reduce the Black and Brown vote have been passed in at least 22 states in recent years, and states where Black and Latino voter turnout or population has surged have been the main targets of these laws. According to an article in The American Prospect, “The Brennan Center for Justice ... found that of the 11 states with the highest African American turnout in 2008, seven passed laws making it harder to vote. Of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic population growth in the 2010 Census, nine have new restrictions in place.”

The proponents of these laws often make no bones about it—they view the increasing numbers of Black and Brown voters as a problem! An Ohio legislator explained his 2012 vote for a measure against making voting harder by saying, “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban [read: African-American] voter-turnout machine.” (American Prospect)

The Commission: Act I

The commission met for the first time in early July. As referenced above, so far it has taken only one major action, which was to request that every state’s election board provide the commission with all of its voters’ names and party affiliations, birth dates, felony conviction records, voting histories for the past decade, and the last four digits of all voters’ Social Security numbers. Kobach said he wanted to match this voter information with other data, like federal records of foreign residents and undocumented immigrants, to spotlight people who cast illegal ballots.

This is an extremely ominous move. It means putting some of the tried and true methods of voter suppression already used on the state level at the service of the national fascist state. This could include systematizing and massively upping the level of using statistical flimflam to generate false reports of voter fraud and then using that to “go national” with the kinds of voter suppression laws and measures discussed in “The State by State Campaign to Strip Away Voting Rights” (see sidebar below right), as well as to justify new measures to strip people of the right to vote.

There is also the question of what else this commission—and the Trump/Pence regime as a whole—might do with the kind of massive database they are trying to develop. Such a database, for example, could be used to target whole sections of the people for persecution based on their voting records, political affiliations, prison records, race, nationality, etc., or for “doxing” (publishing people’s personal information online) of individuals who speak out against the regime.

The commission’s request for records aroused public outrage, and also met opposition from other bourgeois forces for various reasons. Nineteen states refused to comply completely, and another 26 are expected to only partially comply. This was a significant setback for the commission (although it is also worth noting this means that 31 states are either partially or fully complying).

But if there is one thing we know about the Trump/Pence fascists, it is that their response to setbacks is to double down and accelerate their drive to fascism. The drive to marginalize, disenfranchise, and suppress the votes—and the voters—of oppressed nationalities is going to continue, unless and until this regime is driven from power.

1. Naturalized citizens are foreign-born residents who complete the process of becoming U.S. citizens and thus gain the right to vote. [back]

2. As is documented in many places, including below in this article, there is massive voting fraud in the U.S.—not individuals voting twice, etc., but the systematic and multi-faceted campaign by the fascists to suppress the votes of Black and Latino people, through legal and illegal means. [back]

The State by State Campaign to Strip Away Voting Rights

Here are some of the measures already taken in various states to deny Black and Brown people and others their voting rights:

Credit: The Sentencing Project, 2016

* Disenfranchising of felons, including people convicted of nonviolent offenses, often extending years after their release from prison, or in some states for one’s whole life. Because Black people are arrested more frequently, receive heavier charges (i.e., more felonies) and are convicted at much higher rates than other population groups, they are disproportionally affected. According to The Sentencing Project, 2.2 million Black adults—one in every 13—have lost their voting rights in this way, vs. one in 56 of the rest of the population.

* Purging of the rolls: Many states “purge” their voter rolls, based on duplication of names, appearance of names on voter rolls of other states or on lists of convicted felons, etc. This seemingly “neutral” method directly targets Black people. Why? Because African slaves (from whom the great majority of current Black Americans descend) were stripped of their myriad family names and all assigned the name of the relatively small number of slave owners to whom they “belonged.” Therefore, huge numbers of Black people share the same last name. For instance, over three million Black people are named Williams, Johnson, Smith, Jones, Brown, or Jackson. So it is much more common for Blacks than for whites for two people to share the same first and last name, and even the same birthday... which can cause you to be “purged” from the voter rolls.

Another type of purge, used in Ohio and Georgia, is to drop people if they don’t vote in three consecutive elections. Poor voters, whose lives are much more taken up with survival, are more likely to vote only in “high profile” elections, and to skip others. In Ohio, tens of thousands of infrequent voters are slated for removal. (That law has been challenged in court.)

* The case of Florida: In 2000, Florida purged 82,000 alleged convicted felons, using a method that considered John Jackson of Florida and Johnny Jackson of Texas the same person. They also purged Blacks for things like speeding tickets! By their own admission, approximately 10,000 mostly poor, minority, and Democratic voters were purged illegally. This was likely decisive in George W. Bush’s narrow victory in Florida, and hence the national presidential election that year. Again in 2004, Florida purged 48,000 alleged convicted felons, using a method that homed in on Black people and skipped over Hispanics. (In Florida, because of the large number of conservative Cuban immigrants, most Hispanics vote Republican.) Result? 22,000 Blacks were purged, and only 61 Hispanics.

* Barriers to registration and voting—voter ID laws and closing of registration centers: Another set of laws demand that people produce a birth certificate or a passport to vote or to register. Studies (and common sense) show that poor people, whose lives are more transient and chaotic than better-off folks, are much less likely to have these documents at hand. This also guts the voter registration drives of various civic groups who register people on the streets, at their jobs, etc., since few people carry their birth certificates around with them.

Some laws are even more carefully tailored to accentuate race. In Texas, the law accepts a license to carry a concealed handgun (held disproportionately by whites) as voter ID, but not government employee or state university IDs (common to Black and Latino people).

Yet another gambit is to reduce the number of places where people can obtain needed IDs. In 2014, an Alabama law requiring a driver’s license or a state-issued ID available at driver’s license offices (and other venues) went into effect. Then in 2015, Alabama closed 31 of those offices, including the offices in every single county in which Black people were 75 percent of registered voters, and more than half of the counties that voted for Obama in 2012. Voter turnout dropped substantially in the next election.

* Making voting harder for oppressed people: Still another measure is to roll back steps taken to make voting more practical for people in the worse-off end of the working class—often Black and Latino—whose jobs do not give them time off to go vote. Things like “early voting” (before Election Day) or extending voting hours into the evening, which led to big increases in the number of Black people voting, are under attack, particularly in the South.

Gerrymandering: In addition to these laws, there is also the widespread practice of “gerrymandering,” which means changing the borders of voting districts to produce certain political results. One common form of this in Republican-controlled states is to draw one district to contain very high concentrations of Black and Latino voters, so that the remaining districts are heavily white. The result is that white, better-off, and more conservative voters have disproportionally more representation, and the vote of each Black or Brown person actually has less “weight.”

Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 during Mississippi Freedom Summer. (See PBS's “Murder in Mississippi”)

The Right of Black and Brown People to Vote—Paid for in Blood

The right to vote for Black people, as well as for native-born Latinos and naturalized citizens, did not exist for most of U.S. history, and has had to be fought for repeatedly, and at great cost. Even after hundreds of years of slavery ended in 1865 through the Civil War, it took another five years to pass the Fifteenth Amendment, granting voting rights to former slaves and their descendants. But within a decade those rights were effectively stripped away in a wave of KKK terror in which thousands of Black people were killed, ushering in the reign of Jim Crow. For 80 more years, Black people were reduced to near-slave conditions as sharecroppers, often on their old plantations, denied every civil and human right. A Black person could be killed for trying to register to vote, or for looking at a white person the wrong way. Nearly 4,000 Black people were lynched in the South—an average of one a week—over a 73-year period. And Mexican people faced similar oppression and terror in the U.S. Southwest.

In the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, thousands rebelled against this, and the right to vote became a major battleground—in many ways the touchstone and symbol of whether Black people would be respected as full citizens and human beings or not. Thousands were arrested, beaten, and tortured; dozens were murdered.

But tens of thousands more came forward—including many white people—and because of this, as well as changes in the economy and the international situation, the U.S. rulers were compelled to pass the Voting Rights Act. This led to a doubling of Black voters in covered jurisdictions in just two years. The number of Black elected officials across the U.S. went from 1,469 in 1965 to 4,912 in 1980. In 1975, new provisions in the Voting Rights Act protected the right of Spanish-speaking people (who had also been routinely disenfranchised) to vote, which led to a doubling of the Latino vote.

The uprooting of the Jim Crow form of oppression rattled the structures of white supremacy, led to significant improvements in people’s lives, and was welcomed by millions, including many white people. But the U.S. system of capitalism-imperialism is built on, and cannot exist without, the systematic oppression of Black people. So not only did that oppression continue, now in less open and overt ways, but powerful forces in the ruling class began consciously whipping up a backlash of “white resentment” (as well as “male resentment” and “nativism”) against the advances made by people of color.

Today, those ruling class forces, leading and wielding that fascist movement, have come to power, and are driving to reinstate the open subjugation of Black people as a key part of locking down society as a whole and “Making America Great Again.” And stripping Black and Brown people of the right to vote plays a major role in this.

So the assault on the right of Black and Brown people to vote must be fought against. But having the right to vote is not the same thing as whether voting and elections actually are the way to bring about fundamental change; whether this is the key way people in society can influence the direction it takes, and whether this is the highest or most essential form of participation in political life. Bob Avakian got to the basic truth about elections in capitalist society:

To state it in a single sentence, elections: are controlled by the bourgeoisie; are not the means through which basic decisions are made in any case; and are really for the primary purpose of legitimizing the system and the policies and actions of the ruling class, giving them the mantle of a “popular mandate,” and of channeling, confining, and controlling the political activity of the masses of people. (Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That, p. 68)

People are constantly told that the only realistic way to bring about change is through the established channels of this society—Congress, investigations, elections, etc. But history repeatedly points to a different lesson: only action by the masses of people outside those channels can bring significant change for the better.

Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.