The bottom line, however, remains the same: far too much of this guy’s c.v. points to a strident opposition to voting rights. Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at UC Irvine, wrote that von Spakovsky’s appointment “is a big middle finger from the president to those who are serious about fixing problems with our elections.”
As we discussed this morning, there were already ample reasons to be highly skeptical of Trump’s ridiculous “voter integrity” commission, created in large part because of the absurd conspiracy theories the president embraced after losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million Americans.
But now the pretense of propriety is gone. If the White House panel existed for legitimate reasons, Trump wouldn’t have tasked Kansas’ Kris Kobach, a voter-suppression pioneer, to help lead this ridiculous exercise, and he certainly wouldn’t have invited Hans von Spakovsky to serve as a commissioner.
The panel now wants every state in the nation to turn over “their full voter-roll data, including the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security number digits and voting history back to 2006 of potentially every voter in the state.” Why any state official would voluntarily choose to participate in such a farce is unclear.