Donald Trump is very upset about Jill Stein’s recount petition:
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2016
Presidents do not normally imply that their own win was illegitimate. But instead of ridiculing him and telling him to join the recount, we should be very wary. Because Trump is likely to use these groundless statements as a jumping-off point for national voter-suppression efforts. Congress will cooperate because Republicans love suppressing votes; just look at the laws they’ve set in place in every state. (Some allegedly “illegal” voting is always more important than others.)
Hard to believe? Trump has nominated Sen. Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, someone who is, at the very least, hostile to voting rights. As U.S. attorney in Alabama, Sessions targeted voter registration activists — who were later acquitted.
In case you were wondering where Trump got the idea that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by “millions” of votes cast by non-citizens, you might look no further than Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who worked as a Trump adviser and has written voter suppression laws all over the country. Trump is considering him to head up the Department of Homeland Security, and in a picture taken last week, we saw Kobach with an outline stating “Stop Aliens From Voting.”
Kobach is the man promoting CrossCheck, a notoriously inaccurate voter database used to deny a half-million Americans the right to cast a ballot:
On Otterbein Avenue, I met Donald Webster, who, like most in his neighborhood, is African-American.
Crosscheck lists him registered in Ohio as Donald Alexander Webster Jr., while registered a second time as Donald Eugene Webster (no “Jr.”) in Charlottesville, Virginia. Webster says he’s never been a “Eugene” and has never been to Charlottesville. I explained that both he and his Virginia doppelgänger were subject to losing their ability to vote.
“How low can they go?” he asked. “I mean, how can they do that?”
They can. If we let them.
And finally, there’s senior counselor and White House strategist Stephen Bannon, former chairman of the white supremacist Breitbart News , and a man who has posited some disturbing ideas:
Ms. Jones, the film colleague, said that in their years working together, Mr. Bannon occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.
“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’ I said, ‘But what about Wendy?’” referring to Mr. Bannon’s executive assistant. “He said, ‘She’s different. She’s family.’”
So Bannon is not personally racist, according to several friends. He is simply willing to construct institutions that make life more difficult for non-white people to vote.
