Tax dollars paying for voter supression - waste and abuse

"Easy to vote, hard to cheat."

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican

John Husted of Ohio

Smart Republicans realize that unverifiable accusations about the integrity of the election also draws into question all of the outcomes counted on every ballot and on referenda! It's not all about Donald Trump!

Waste and abuse of tax money to make Donald Trump feel like he is a legitimately elected leader is back door racism. It's his intention to use this power and government money to call into question millions of legal voters who are likely to be of Hispanic, African-American or minority racial ancestry.

Rather than create a sense of competence, peace and establish a confident leadership style, Donald Trump is abusing tax payer money, by the hour, while signing executive orders that have no fiduciary integrity. 

Who is going to pay for the property being trespassed to build the Dakota Pipeline? What will the process be for hiring contractors to build the expensive and useless wall to give the illusion of immigration control with Mexico? These orders are expensive!

Yet, in this spiral of waste and abuse the one ludicrous Tweeted intention Donald Trump has bullied into the public domain is his intention to pay for an investigation into non-existent voter fraud. He's going to do this because it's his intention to bully his way into making his illegitimate election somehow seem credible.  In fact, if the truth was really important to Donald Trump, he'd call the entire 2016 election Russian invasion of the United States and demand another election. Instead, Trump's intention is to have the attorney general Senator Sessions write an edict to claim voter fraud caused Donald Trump to loose the popular vote by 2.8 million. In other words, Donald Trump never won the 2016 presidential election! He was elected by the Electoral College, a politically appointed body of people who did not do their jobs by voting for the best qualified candidate who won the popular vote. Unfortunately, and tragically, for the world, the Electoral College ignored millions of letters from American citizens who implored them to vote for the candidate who was mentally qualified, experienced and who won the popular vote. In fact, the Electors were petitioned to vote for Hillary Clinton.  Unbelievably, they voted for Donald Trump.  

Now, it is reported that Donald Trump's fragile ego is so disrupted by this undisputed loss that he's going to create his own version of voter fraud by declare his loss was based on undocumented people who voted. Unbelievable liar. 

Meanwhile, Trump will waste taxpayer money to rewrite the sacred word, signed by 50 American Secretaries of States, who are sworn to uphold election integrity.

NewsMax reports:  President Donald Trump on Wednesday morning doubled down on his repeated claims that voter fraud was widespread in November's election, calling for a "major investigation."

Trump made the announcement on Twitter shortly after 7 a.m., building on his previous claims that voting by illegal immigrants cost him to loose the popular vote.

"I (ie, "King Trump") will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and....(next Tweet) even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!"

Oh My God, I'm going to hurry and warn my parents and in-laws to be prepared, their cemetery plots might well be at risk for exhumation, just to prove they're really in those buried caskets! Yikes! I don't think their remains will have ID cards.  What'll I do?

Trump's pledge to call for an investigation comes after he told members of Congress on Monday, at a private White House reception, that he believes he lost the popular vote in his election because 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants cast votes for his opponent, his press secretary Sean Spicer, said Tuesday.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes, but Trump won enough states to secure 306 Electoral College votes and the presidency.

Since the election election, Trump has repeatedly said he would have won the popular vote if not for massive voter fraud that benefited Clinton.  Nevertheless, Trump's team has not yet provided specific evidence to back up his belief.

Asked by reporters Tuesday why the Trump administration had not ordered an investigation into voting practices, White House spokesman Sean Spicer at first said the president was "comfortable" with his victory.

"Maybe we will" investigate, Spicer said later. "We'll see where we go from here but right now the president's focus is on putting people back to work." (Good one Sean! You make some sense here, Boom!)

Trump's claim was disputed by Democratic and some Republican officials, including those who run state election systems. Other Republicans support his claims- without proof.

Some who disagree with Trump say his allegations undermine confidence in U.S. democracy.

Previous probes by academic researchers, the Department of Justice, and other government agencies have found little evidence of large-scale voter fraud in the U.S. The National Association of Secretaries of State said there was no evidence of such fraud in 2016.

"We are not aware of any evidence that supports the voter fraud claims made by President Trump," the group of state elections officials said Tuesday in a statement. "In the lead up to the November 2016 election, secretaries of state expressed their confidence in the systemic integrity of our election process as a bipartisan group, and they stand behind that statement today."

Trump's own legal team argued that the 2016 election "was not tainted by fraud" in response to a recount effort by Green Party candidate Jill Stein in Michigan.

"All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake," Trump's lawyers said in a Dec. 1 legal filing. (So why do some stupid Republicans believe The Big Lie?)

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, said in a reply to Trump's tweet that it would be difficult for illegal voters to cast ballots.

"We conducted a review 4 years ago in Ohio & already have a statewide review of 2016 election underway," he said in a tweet Wednesday. "Easy to vote, hard to cheat."

Speaking to reporters Tuesday,  presser Spicer referred to a study "that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who have voted were non-citizens" as evidence that 2016 voter fraud was widespread.

It was not clear what information Spicer was referring to. A Pew Charitable Trusts spokeswoman said that no such study exists.
"We did not publish a report in 2008 on that topic," Pew spokeswoman Kelly Hoffman said in an email to Bloomberg News. "Our work has focused on inefficient and inaccurate voter registration processes, which are not evidence of fraud at polling places."

Matthew Miller, former director of the Department of Justice's Office of Public Affairs during the Obama administration, called Trump's planned investigation "dangerous."

"The federal government is now going to launch an investigation into something where there is no evidence any wrongdoing has occurred, all because the president's ego is hurt," he said. "Then Republicans will use that investigation to justify restrictions that make it harder for people to vote." Trump has previously cited a separate study from 2014, that found that 14 percent of non-citizens may have been registered to vote in 2008.

The study, first described in a 2014 Washington Post opinion piece, found that some of those non-citizens may have voted. The newspaper, at the time, published a series of rebuttals questioning the data and conclusions and has since posted a note on it saying that another peer-reviewed article argued the findings "were biased and that the authors' data do not provide evidence of non-citizen voting in U.S. elections."

A 2012 study by Pew found that as many as one in eight voter registrations in the U.S. either had significant inaccuracies or were no longer valid. The author of that study, David Becker, said the research didn't back up Trump's claim of vote fraud.

(Sadly, neither Donald Trump nor many concrete thinking Republicans are convinced by data, science or independent research.)

"As I've noted before, (said Becker) voting integrity was better in this election than ever before," Becker, now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said Tuesday in a Twitter post. "Zero evidence of fraud."

Although there's zero evidence of voter fraud, there's plenty of evidence for taxpayer money waste and abuse to create #alternative_facts and #fake_news to appease Donald Trump's deteriorating ego. Either this waste of resources will anger voters to respond like the women who created the Womens March phenomenon or the investigation will serve to create voter suppression.  Of course, I'm praying for the Women's March analogy.