No excuse for that voting commission

Thank goodness, New Mexico’s Secretary of State, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, has refused to send New Mexico voter data to the president’s so-called Election Integrity Commission.

There is no excuse for this commission. Evidence, including the resumes of its members, supports the suspicion that it was set up not to ensure election integrity but to implement voter suppression, possibly by purging large numbers of minority voters from the rolls.

And it’s dangerous. A big centralized database is a huge target for hackers, Russian or anyone else. The 50 decentralized state databases are a protection.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union and several other organizations have filed federal lawsuits opposing this commission.  The NAACP stated the commission “was formed with the intent to discriminate against voters of color in violation of the Constitution.”

About 30 states participate in a multistate organization called Interstate Crosscheck, which reportedly reviewed member states’ databases in 2016. This organization is headed by Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State and vice chair of the president’s commission. New Mexico belongs to a competing organization called The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), whose stated mission includes increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.

Investigative reports claim Interstate Crosscheck systematically purged minority voters in 2016, using similarity of voters’ names as a pretext for claiming they were registered twice. Interstate Crosscheck should be required to make its findings public, especially all names that were purged in 2016, to see its results and whether it was finding genuine duplications or targeting classes of voters to be illegally purged.

In the early days of the United States, in most states only white male property owners could vote. Voting rights for non-property owners, women and racial minorities have been won over time with huge political upheavals, including the civil rights movement, along the way.

Reports claim Native Americans still have limited ballot access. They were originally not allowed to vote because they were not deemed citizens. After federal law was changed in 1924, states decided individually who could vote. It took more than 40 years for all 50 states to allow Native Americans to vote. In New Mexico, according to an account from the state historian, the state constitution originally said they couldn’t vote because they weren’t taxed. A court decision changed that in 1948.

Last year, Indian Country Today Media Network reported that Native American and Alaska Natives flagged voting-related problems in 17 states. Recent voter ID laws in some states reportedly have made it more difficult for Native Americans to register and vote.

It is sad that this has become a partisan issue. Some Republicans, including Oliver’s 2016 opponent, have made the myth of massive voter fraud virtually an article of faith. The large-scale fraud the president alleges would have required a multistate organization to persuade a few million people to commit a crime from which they would derive no personal benefit. This is not only absurd, it could not have happened without being publicly exposed. Yet the story persists.

In 2012, New Mexico scored an embarrassing national headline when an Albuquerque man registered his dog to vote. He said he did it to prove how lax our voter laws are. Later it was revealed his wife was on the staff of Republican Heather Wilson, who was running for U.S. Senate.

The New Mexico Republican Party says on its website, “We support that every eligible citizen should have the the right to vote.” It goes on to state the need for protection against fraudulent voting. But New Mexico already has established that it cannot identify more than a couple of fraudulent votes, after former Republican secretary of state Dianna Duran hunted for them in 2011. We don’t need protection from fraudulent voting because there is virtually none.

Triple Spaced Again, © New Mexico News Services 2017

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