Whitley, a longtime aide to Texas's Republican governor and former state attorney general Greg Abbott, is the latest GOP politician to take up the monomaniacal pursuit of mostly imaginary illegal voting by noncitizens. President Trump is the leading victim of this clinical obsession with his repeated claim that he would have won the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election but for the supposed millions of noncitizen voters who, apparently, broke overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton.
As with so many of Trump's utterances, the Liar in Chief has no evidence whatsoever to support this preposterous claim about noncitizen voting in the 2016 election. Whitley, on the other hand, deserves at least partial credit for finishing up a study authorized under a recent Texas law aimed at gathering actual evidence of noncitizen voting in the state.
The study, immediately touted by the state's Republican attorney general Ken Paxton, raised alarms nationwide after Trump and conservative commentators began citing it as the long-sought proof of noncitizen voting. On the surface, the study seemed sensible enough by correlating noncitizens who applied to the state's Department of Public Safety for driver licenses with names on county election registration rolls.
The logical flaw, however, results from the extended time period covered by the study since many of the noncitizen drivers could have become naturalized citizens by the time they registered to vote years later. In fact, Texas secretary of state officials involved in the study learned before releasing their results that other states had encountered this very problem with similar studies and had acknowledged their results to be questionable.
The obsessive search for illegal voting by noncitizens naturally brings to mind Captain Ahab's self-destructive pursuit of the white whale in Moby Dick or the Bush administration's empty-handed search for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Among the other recent victims of this neurosis is the Senate's Republican leader, Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, who wrongly claimed in an op-ed essay [Jan. 18] that California election officials had recently allowed 23,000 ineligible voters to register. Five days later, the Washington Post ran a correction to note that the figure "referred to registration errors such as wrongly recorded party affiliations, not ineligible voters."
McConnell cited the fake statistics in the course of a broad attack on the Democratic-sponsored bill in the House of Representatives aimed at making it easier to vote by requiring, among other practices, automatic voter registration and early voting in federal elections. The Democratic sponsors call H.R. 1 the "For the People Act," but McConnell dismisses it instead as "the Democrat Politician Protection Act" on the wrongheaded premise that it is designed to allow federal workers to take a day off to campaign for Democratic candidates.
Meanwhile, local election officials in Texas were dealing with the serious issues resulting from a wrongheaded directive from the state elections chief to purge supposed noncitizens from their registration rolls. In Harris County, the state's largest, election officials reported that they had cleared 18,000 voters who had been wrongly identified in the secretary of state's study as potential noncitizens, as reported in the Texas Tribune.
The Tribune reported that four other large counties had received messages from Whitley's office acknowledging possible errors in identifying some of the voters as noncitizens. By week's end, Whitley had not officially acknowledged the errors, but the office's spokesman backpedaled somewhat by explaining that the office was "continuing to provide information to the counties to assist them" in verifying voter eligibility.
The long-established Latino advocacy group known by its acronym as LULAC sued Whitley's office in federal court by claiming that the enforcement steps taken based on the flawed study amounted to voter intimidation. "Voter fraud is a lie," LULAC's president Domengo Garcia said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit. "It's a big lie made to disenfranchise primarily African-American, Latino voters in Texas."
By now, any court can take judicial notice of the fact that Republican lawmakers and officials have enacted laws and adopted policies over the past two decades deliberately aimed at making it harder to vote so as to disadvantage groups likely to favor Democratic candidates at the polls. As one datum, a judge could note that Mississippi's newly elected Republican U.S. senator Cindy Hyde-Smith told a rally after her election in November that it would be "a great idea" to "make it just a little more difficult' to vote."
The Supreme Court has been complicit in the Republicans' voter suppression by upholding state voter ID laws despite the lack of any measurable evidence of fraudulent voter impersonation at the polls. In today's poisonously polarized political climate, the right to vote no longer enjoys bipartisan support nor strong judicial protection. The fake statistics spread around by Republicans in state capitals and Washington alike undercut what should be a sacred privilege. More than ever, federal courts need to step in boldly when called on to police the politically driven tactics to devalue this most precious of rights in our democracy.
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