Russian sabotage of our 2016 Presidential election was not a stand-alone event. Neither is the Republican refusal to appoint an Independent Special Prosecutor to investigate that sabotage and any collusion with it by the Trump campaign.
It is part of a larger picture — a picture that includes Republican leaders’ resistance, if not refusal, to inform the public about the CIA’s and Obama Administration warning‘s on Russian interference with our election, and GOP voter suppression tactics that denied a just and fair election while putting Donald Trump in the White House. The integrity of the 2016 election was under attack from both within and without.
Pew Research Center’s analysis found that for the first time in twenty years Black voter turn-out fell, while the expected surge in Latino voting never occurred. 2016 was the first Presidential election in fifty years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. 14 states had voting restrictions for the first time. Without that shift in turnout, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have well gone for Hillary Clinton.
In Wisconsin alone, 200,000 voters were removed from the voting roles. Trump “won” Wisconsin by only 22,748 votes.
A recent study shows that states without strict voter ID laws saw a normal increase in voter turnout. Those with strict voter ID laws saw a voter drop as much as 3.3% — a decline that could make all the difference in close elections.
While states with no change to voter identification laws witnessed an average increased turnout of +1.3% from 2012 to 2016, Wisconsin’s turnout (where voter ID laws changed to strict) dropped by -3.3%. If turnout had instead increased by the national no-change average, we estimate that over 200,000 more voters would have voted in Wisconsin in 2016.
Wisconsin represents a disturbing nation-wide trend.
In states where the voter identification laws did not change between ’12 and ’16, turnout was up +1.3%. In states where ID laws changed to non-strict (AL, NH, RI) turnout increased less, and was only up by +0.7%. In states where ID laws changed to strict (MS, VA, WI) turnout actually decreased by – 1.7%.
...In Mississippi, Virginia, and Wisconsin, strict voter-ID laws had an especially pronounced negative impact on African-American voters….
Republican efforts to suborn voting rights continues at an alarming rate. On May 10th, the Brennan Center for Justice released an update of its 2017 Voting Laws Roundup. Their findings should be a resounding call to action by every American.
(Note: This updates the Roundup previously published on March 27, 2017.)
At this point in the year, every state’s legislature is either in session or has completed its 2017 calendar. As has been the case all decade, legislators across the country are trying to reshape state voting laws. In several places, this means it will soon be harder to vote: Five states have already enacted bills to cut back on voting access, and one more is on the verge of doing so. By comparison, three states enacted voting restrictions in 2015 and 2016 combined. Overall, however, more bills to expand access to voting were introduced this year than bills that would restrict voting access. Still, of the legislation making the most substantial impact on voting access, more legislation to limit participation is advancing toward passage. Moreover, governors in Nebraska and Nevada have vetoed the bills that would expand access to the franchise….
...Overall, at least 99 bills to restrict access to registration and voting have been introduced in 33 states. Thirty-Five such bills saw significant legislative action (meaning they have at least been approved at the committee level or beyond) in 17 states….
Republican efforts to deny Americans their most essential lawful right has continued in 2017 on the Federal level, beginning with the Trump Administration’s nomination of Jeff Session to head the Department of Justice and subsequent Senate Republican approval. Sessions’ hostility to civil and voting rights is well documented. He has opposed voting rights for years.
As an ACLU examination of Session’s record explained, that opposition included his role as an assistant US Attorney General for the Southern District of Alabama in prosecuting three Black civil rights activists for voter fraud.
During his confirmation hearing back in 1986, Sessions received withering questioning from senators for his prosecution of three Black civil rights activists in 1985 for voter fraud. One of the defendants, Albert Turner, was the son of a sharecropper and an aide to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who led the wagon that carried King’s body at his funeral. Turner was beaten by police at the “Bloody Sunday” Selma to Montgomery march and was nicknamed “Mr. Voter Registration” for his work registering Black voters after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1964. Facing more than 100 years in prison for violating the Voting Rights Act, according to The Nation, Turner, his wife, and his friend were acquitted on all charges by a jury of seven Blacks and five whites.
The report went on to state that —
...In 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder rendered Section 5 protections toothless. As we predicted, the Supreme Court’s decision initiated a flurry of laws to weaken voter protections. Since the Shelby decision, 17 states approved new voting restrictions that weren’t in place during the last presidential election, including cutbacks to early voting as well as onerous and unnecessary documentation requirements.
Sessions has not spoken out against these unnecessary restrictions on people's voting rights. But, in an echo of the failed Albert Turner prosecution, Sessions has continued to make unsubstantiated assertions about widespread voter fraud, including suggestions that unspecified actors were “attempting to rig [the 2016] election.” Throughout the country, we have seen politicians make similar baseless allegations of fraud to justify undue barriers to the ballot...
It’s no fluke that Sessions was nominated by a President who has repeatedly claimed that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in 2017, a claim that has been debunked. In spite of numerous reports showing that voter fraud is a fever dream sold to credulous Republican voters, Trump has doubled down on his claim of fraud and signed an executive order creating a voter fraud commission. That commission will be chaired by Vice President Pence and co-chaired by the “King of Voter Suppression”, Kris Kobach.
Dale Ho, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project explained his description of Kobach in an ACLU piece.
...Kris Kobach is the king of voter suppression. He has an obsession with trying to show that there is widespread cheating in our elections when there isn’t. In Kansas, he’s instituted a “Show Me Your Papers” law which requires people to show a birth certificate or passport when they register to vote. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in a unanimous opinion by Judge Jerome Holmes, who was appointed by George W. Bush, found that Kobach had engaged in “mass denial of a fundamental right” by blocking 18,000 motor voter applicants from registering to vote.
After he was ordered to fix that problem, Kobach said fine, I’ll let those voters vote in federal elections, but I’m not going to let them vote in state and local elections. We had to go back into court and this time, a state judge said Kobach had no authority to separate Kansas’ election system into a bizarre two-tiered system where some people could vote for president, but not governor. Kobach tried to justify these laws by saying that there is widespread voter fraud. The 10th Circuit called that “pure speculation.”
In yet another case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that Kobach had “precious little record evidence” of non-citizen voting. So this is a person who shamelessly spreads a myth of widespread voter fraud, has no evidence to back it up, and uses it as a justification for laws which suppress voting. One out of seven people who’ve tried to register in Kansas since his “Show Me Your Papers” law went into effect have been blocked from registering to vote….
As Ho noted, half of the people in Kansas who have been blocked by this law are under the age of 30. This is a voter suppression plot.
In January of this year, a Republican Majority on the House Administration Committee voted to eliminate the Independent Election Commission charged with helping states improve their voting systems.
There is a connection between Republican voter suppression and GOP opposition to an Independent Special Prosecutor on Russia’s sabotage of our election. Republicans are running the table to push through every odious policy they can while Trump is in the White House. Obstructing any investigation into Russia’s sabotage of our election, and any possible Trump campaign collusion, gives the GOP time to solidify their hold on power. And nothing ensures that hold more than voter suppression.
They have put holding power above country. Nothing matters more to them, not even an attack by a hostile foreign power on our most sacred institutions and rights.
The Senate used 47 staffers to investigate Benghazi. The House Committee investigating Benghazi had 46 staffers, eight interns, and spent around seven million dollars. Neither the Senate or House Committees investigating Russia’s attacks on our democratic process comes close: the 1970’s special Senate committee’s investigation into Watergate had 133 staffers. The Senate committee investigating Russia’s attack on our election has fewer than a dozen. The House Intelligence Committee investigating Russian sabotage of our election hasn’t properly functioned since Devin Nunce was forced to step down as Chairman early in April. Also in April, Republican Committee members “boycotted” a briefing.
...Republicans boycotted a Wednesday briefing on Russian intelligence methods organized by Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, who had hoped the committee’s members could gather in a bipartisan manner to hear non-controversial testimony from an expert.
Weeks ago, House Intelligence Committee staff and Swalwell reached out to a national-security specialist, Naveed Jamali. In the 2000s, Jamali was a double agent in the service of the FBI after the Russian government tried to recruit him as an asset.
Every single Republican lawmaker on the House Intelligence Committee was invited to the members-only briefing on Wednesday. Not one showed….
Republican Senator Lindsay Graham trying to explain it all away be saying that “this is not Watergate” is obfuscating at best.
This is worse. As James Fellows stated in his piece for The Atlantic Magazine, what has been alleged by US and Foreign Intelligence Agencies is —
...Nothing less than attacks by an authoritarian foreign government on the fundamentals of American democracy, by interfering with an election—and doing so as part of a larger strategy that included parallel interference in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere. At worst, such efforts might actually have changed the election results. At least, they were meant to destroy trust in democracy. Not much of this is fully understood or proven, but the potential stakes are incomparably greater than what happened during Watergate, crime and cover-up alike.
This is an attack upon the United States by a hostile foreign power, one aided and abetted by a GOP leadership more concerned with holding power than upholding their sworn Constitutional duty.
From the US Code —
18 U.S. Code § 2381 - Treason
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
Russia has engaged the United States in a new kind of warfare. The very foundations of our Republic are under attack — Americans’ voting rights, due process of law, faith in our electoral process, and trust in government institutions.
Those attacks are not just coming from Russia.
Republican leaders attempted to quash or dismiss CIA and Obama Administration reports on Russia’s sabotage of the 2016 election. They have continued to obstruct or impede any real investigation into Russia’s attack on our Republic, all while doing everything possible to suppress voting rights in order to increase their hold on power.
By doing so they have suborned their oaths of office, betraying the Nation they swore to “protect and defend.”