CommentsTHE COHEN COLUMN--This is a resource to give you a reliable voice of political truth and hopefully will productive activism.
Consider the dirty track record of Kris Kobach, the guy that Trump has put in charge of his new so-called Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. (Photo above: President Trump and Kris Kobach.)
Kobach is the criminal mastermind who spearheaded the "Crosscheck" scheme he actually implemented to purge millions of people, in particular people with ethnic last names, and therefore presumed more likely to vote Democratic, from the voter registration roles in dozens of states in the last election.
So when Kobach pontificates that every vote is precious, and that we have to go on a phantom hunt (let's give the witches a metaphoric cliché rest), lest a single illegal voter "cancel" the vote of
someone else, we are listening to a wolf howling about the sanctity of sheep safety.
Any chance that this "commission" will investigate Kobach's own widespread multi-state voter suppression scam? Sure, a fat blue moon chance of that.
Trump asks rhetorically what people are worried about with the mass national collection of personal voter information in one place, including their voting HISTORY.
Well, we'll tell you what we're worried about.
We're worried that Kobach will do something a thousand times worse than what he did with the databases he DID have access to, when he effectively canceled the voting rights of millions of people because someone in ANOTHER state had the same last name, not even an exact
match for their complete name, on the ludicrous contention that millions of people were jet setting around on election day to vote in multiple states at once.
What could possibly go wrong?
They have ALREADY sloppily exposed, by publishing them un-redacted on the internet, the personal email addresses of people who commented on their new website.
This is a commission that will meet mostly in secret, and without outside accountability. The press and the public were excluded even from the dog and pony show, self-congratulatory "meeting" streamed on video the other day.
What do we have to worry about? The answer is everything.
We have no doubt that people on the voter rolls die eventually, and may not have their registrations lapse automatically. But there is no evidence whatsoever that anybody is out there impersonating any of these dearly departed on Election Day.
Not only will this commission not find evidence that literally millions of people voted illegally, Trump's lying excuse as to why he did not win the popular vote count, there is no chance they will find
even a statistically significant number. This whole commission is a massive search party in pursuit of something that simply does not exist. They might as well call it the Presidential Commission on
Unicorns and Leprechauns.
The good news is that virtually no states will cooperate in surrendering their voters' private personal information to this fraudulently justified "commission," not even Kobach HIMSELF, in his own capacity as the Kansas Secretary of State.
So keep up the resistance against the mounting frauds of Donald Trump and Company. And yes the US unknowingly elected a corporation as President and who keeps his financial dealings a secret from his competitors which ARE the American people.
(Michael N. Cohen is a former board member of the Reseda Neighborhood Council, founding member of the LADWP Neighborhood Council Oversight Committee, founding member of LA Clean Sweep and a contributor to CityWatch.)
-cw
