{"id":347828,"date":"2018-02-11T20:34:37","date_gmt":"2018-02-11T19:34:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/get-ready-for-more-voter-suppression-2\/"},"modified":"2018-02-11T20:34:37","modified_gmt":"2018-02-11T19:34:37","slug":"get-ready-for-more-voter-suppression-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/get-ready-for-more-voter-suppression-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Ready for More Voter Suppression"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When President Trump created the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” last spring — and put notorious vote suppressor Kris Kobach<\/a> at the helm — voting rights advocates had decades<\/a> of good reasons to be concerned. The panel seemed destined to back harsh restrictions on voting rights.<\/p>\n

The fraught commission<\/a> was recently disbanded. But while that provides a momentary sigh of relief, it doesn’t mean that this Trump-Kobach crusade — or voter suppression — has gone away.<\/p>\n

For one, there’s still a lot we don’t know about what information the commission collected and what the administration intends to do with it now.<\/p>\n

Early reports are troubling. For instance, we now know the commission asked Texas to turn over a list of its voters with Hispanic last names<\/a> flagged. The threat of officials using this data to fuel large-scale voter roll purges looms large.<\/p>\n

Kobach, who’s served as Kansas secretary of state since 2011 and is currently running for governor, says that he remains at the center<\/a> of ongoing administration efforts to crack down on voting. (Trump claims “illegal votes” cost him the popular vote in 2016, despite the lack of any evidence<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Disturbingly, both Kobach and Trump have said that the Department of Homeland Security will now take up their cause.<\/p>\n

While Homeland Security counters that its priority is election infrastructure, not voter fraud, the agency also says that it’s working with a handful of states to compare voter data with citizenship data<\/a>. In addition, the Department of Justice (whose leader, Jeff Sessions<\/a>, is a notorious voting rights foe) made a sweeping voter data request<\/a> around the same time that the commission was getting going.<\/p>\n

Even without a formal voting commission, the threat of eligible voters who’ve done nothing wrong having their rights restricted is still very real. Twenty states<\/a> are considering bills this year that would restrict the ability to vote.<\/p>\n

This includes Kobach’s home state of Kansas as well as New Hampshire, where…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When President Trump created the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” last spring — and put notorious vote suppressor Kris Kobach at the helm — voting rights advocates had decades of good reasons to be concerned. The panel seemed destined to back harsh restrictions on voting rights. The fraught commission was recently disbanded. But while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-347828","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}