Neil Gorsuch with Donald Trump. (photo: Reuters)
22 January 18
he US Supreme Court may be about to make a second Trump term inevitable.
The nine "Justices" have just heard oral arguments in
an Ohio voter registration case. If their decision goes with Secretary
of State Jon Husted, it would mean Republicans like him throughout the
United States will be able to scrub from the voter rolls millions of
citizens merely because they are suspected of wishing to vote Democrat.
In Ohio alone, millions of Ohio voters have tried to
vote on Election Day over the past four presidential elections, only to
find their names were erased from the pollbooks.
What's technically at stake is whether the federal
government has the right to demand fairness in purging voter
registration rolls. Or will the secretaries of the various states be
free to purge whomever they want.
In other words, it's supposedly a "state’s rights" case.
But this is a country where an Attorney-General who
fought for state’s rights to avoid accepting racial integration is now
overriding the explicit choice of some thirty states to enjoy legal
marijuana.
In Ohio, secretary Husted has become infamous for his
extremely aggressive partisan purges. The state has roughly 5.5 million
voters. GOP secretaries of state have become experts at the selective
purging game.
In 2004, then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell,
stripped some 309,000 voters from the rolls and nearly all came from
heavily Democratic cities – Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. In
Cleveland, nearly a quarter, 24.96% of all voters were removed from the
voting rolls.
Blackwell simultaneously served as co-chair for the
state campaign to re-elect Bush/Cheney. Despite the obvious conflict of
interest, Blackwell was officially in charge of running that election.
The election was decided by less than 119,000 votes, giving George W.
Bush a victory over John Kerry, who never said a word.
As many as 300,000 of those votes were flipped on
electronic "push and pray" machines by a Bush family consigliere
operating on an unbid state contract with a bank of servers in Tennessee
between 12:20am and 2am election night.
Between the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, an extensive study conducted by the Free Press
examining all of the voter registration rolls in the state’s 88
counties found that 1.25 million had been scrubbed from the rolls.
Again, these purged voters were overwhelming from Democratic precincts.
The latest Husted tactic is to mail letters to
citizens who have not voted in the last two elections. He demands they
write him back to confirm where they live. Husted's letters do not
contain return envelopes.
The now-defunct welfare rights organization ACORN and
the Obama campaign had to engage in a massive project to re-register the
voters before Election Day.
In the run up to the 2012 presidential election, the Free Press
exposed the fact that 1.1 million voters had been purged, according to
public records. The purges were highest in poor, minority and urban
precincts.
The rural county boards of elections that are overwhelmingly Republican rarely strip any voters from the voting rolls.
In other words, if you receive junk mail from the
Secretary of State, along with all the other junk mail you get, it's not
enough that it got to you without bouncing back.
Husted instead demands
a personal response, or else he will void your right to vote.
Part of his public excuse is that citizens who have
died may remain on the voter rolls.
But the obvious solution would be to
link directly with the state's coroner offices and integrate death
notices into the management of the voter rolls.
Husted is also notorious for seizing on minuscule
miscues to pitch ballots. An omitted middle initial, a name that has
changed, forgetting to write your birthdate on an absentee ballot, or
putting something on the wrong line….all are fair game for Husted to
make sure you don't cast a ballot, or that if you do it's a provisional
which he will then pitch in the trash depending on your age, skin color
or social class.
In the 2016 election, Husted's office failed to send
absentee ballots to more than a million citizens, again virtually all in
urban areas.
What can’t be explained is why, in a computer age with
unlimited hard drives in a state that requires voters to show ID at the
polls, you would strip any registered voters unless you knew they had
died or you had evidence they no longer lived in the county.
Should the Court allow this to continue, GOP
Secretaries of State around the US can be counted on to purge voter
rolls deep and wide enough to swing almost any election.
The White House recently established a national
commission to move the stripping to a new level. Blackwell was a charter
member. So was Kris Kobach of Kansas (KKK) who pioneered the use of the
Crosscheck computer program to strip the rolls in some thirty
GOP-controlled states.
Last month Trump suddenly, without explanation,
abolished the commission. But as investigative reported Greg Palast has
shown, the registration stripping has been moved into the Department of
Homeland Security. Where Kobach's commission was opaque, now the
partisan purge process with be essentially invisible. State officials
who refused to provide critical information to Kobach may now have no
choice with DHS.
In other words, America's Trump-run FBI/KGB/Savak
apparatus may now have the power to silently and invisibly remove enough
potential voters to elect and re-elect whoever it wants.
That might include not only Trump, but Husted, who is
running to become Ohio's lieutenant-governor, and Kobach, who wants to
be governor of Kansas.
This and much else could turn on the Supremes'
decision on the Ohio case. Should Husted's right to purge whoever he
wants from the voter rolls be confirmed by the Court, our sham elections
will become an even bigger charade.
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