This is not even remotely surprising:
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) pushed officials at the state’s Department of Public Safety to scour driver’s license records for noncitizens and forward that information to the Texas secretary of state, a fellow Republican, in advance of the state’s botched voter purge, according to emails made public Tuesday.
Texas officials would go on to falsely claim that they had found nearly 100,000 noncitizens registered to vote. They later admitted that number was based on deeply flawed data. But some Texas officials knew all along that they could access more information in order to determine whether the people whose driver’s licenses said they were noncitizens were actually noncitizens, the emails suggest — and pushed ahead regardless.
The emails, obtained by the Campaign Legal Center as part of litigation over the purge effort, provide the first look behind the scenes into a highly controversial state effort to identify noncitizens on Texas’ voter rolls. The state has refused to comply with a congressional request to turn over communications and documents related to the January incident.
It doesn’t matter if you are actually a citizen, Republicans don’t consider you a full citizen if your skin is a certain color or if your last name is harder to pronounce than Smith. And nothing will happen in John Roberts’ post-racial America.
raven
One of my best buddies in the green machine was Natividad Espinosa from San Antone. . . it wasn’t that hard to say if you tired.
OzarkHillbilly
Every election day I wait for my wife to come home and we go together to vote. Being a morning person who rarely wants to leave home after 5 pm I would much prefer to vote first thing in the AM, BUT… Her being a Spanish born naturalized US citizen living in buttfuck Misery and voting at the Pea Ridge fire station, I’m going to make damn sure nobody fucks with her right to vote.
rikyrah
No shock in the least ???
rikyrah
So many reasons why I think that Abbott should go to jail ??
schrodingers_cat
@OzarkHillbilly: The women running elections in my little farming town in western Mass are really nice. Our polling station has no lines. I even canvassed outside it during the last primaries. That was fun, canvassers for other candidates were hanging out in the school parking lot too. We had a great time. Of course my candidate won, so it was even more fun!
ETA: I am glad I don’t live in Texas.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Damn, I’m so sick of these people. I’m sick of them, I’m sick of the people who vote for them, I’m sick of the drones and hacks in the press who give them cover, I’m sick of the people who know this is happening but are too lazy or complacent to get off their dead asses and vote, I’m just sick of everything.
satby
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): right there with you. Which is part of what Republicans hope for, and even though I know that, it’s still exhausting.
tobie
It’s looking more and more like Republicans stole the Texas Senate seat, Georgia’s Governor’s seat, Florida’s Senate seat and possibly Florida’s Governor’s seat in 2018. I wish I could say this surprises me…
It’s a coincidence but O’Rourke released his voting rights proposal today which covers everything from shoring up the VRA to ending gerrymandering to paper ballots and to automatic voter registration. Here’s the main pitch:
MomSense
There is not a single decent Republican. Not one. Being a Republican is an endorsement of these anti democratic motherfuckers like Abbott.
sherparick
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Part of the goal of the tactic of being unrelentingly evil is to wear the opponents down. Its hard to remember, although never good, Texas Government was not this unrelentingly bad 30 years ago. Ann Richards got elected Governor in 1990, bless the FSM. But the preachers and the right-wing oil millionaires kept at it every minute of everyday and now glory in fucking over as many people as possible for the crime of not being rich and white. Jeebus obviously does not love them because they are not rich and white and male, so lets screw them over.
laura
The very long and sordid history of Republican voter suppression, poll tax, literacy tests, voter Id, voter intimidation, caging, moving polling places, closing polling places, too few voting machines, ballots, permanent loss of the franchise through the criminal “justice” system, fraudulent allegations of voter fraud, the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act – along with the pantheon of creeps – pre-supreme court justices Rhenquist, Roberts, Paul Weyrich, kris Kobach, a slew of US attorney’s during the Bush the lesser administration. All because Republican policies are so awful, benefit the few at the expense of the majority, the best interests of the nation, that they can only win by this non-stop fuckery, year after year, after year.
They cant win unless they cheat. So, I am not surprised.
Not surprised at all.
burnspbesq
Is it worth noting that what the Texas Republicans tried to do didn’t work?
chris
Damn! Thread
OzarkHillbilly
@schrodingers_cat:
The folks at our precinct are too, it’s not them I worry about. While I doubt the local GOP would ever send anyone down to our little precinct, every time we go I half expect some local yokel true patriot who’s had a few afternoon beers will hear her name and her accent and make a scene. My wife does not do scenes. I do, even as I try to avoid them.
NotMax
@chris
The implication being that all the other beats have little to nothing to do with truth?
Sounds more like he’s been hired to be a fact checker drudge than a reporter.
OzarkHillbilly
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Stop beating around the bush and tell us how you really feel.
Baud
@chris:
I just hope CNN doesn’t pressure him into achieving false balance.
chris
@NotMax: Dale has always been an excellent adversarial reporter. I’m more concerned that CNN will use him to “both sides!” the hell out of everything. On the other hand, good for him! It’ll be a lot more money and exposure.
chris
@Baud: Yep.
NotMax
@chris
Nothing against him. I only hope he has a good pair of hip boots and open eyes as to what he’s stepping into.
Ohio Mom
@schrodingers_cat: After so many years, I recognize the regular canvassers at my polling place: the irate nurse Republican, the fellow with very mild ID Republican, and so on. You gotta give them credit for consistency, showing up faithfully as they do, but as I vaguely recall, something about hobgoblins and little minds.
Gin & Tonic
@chris: Goddamn furriner taking a good Murican job…
NotMax
@Ohio Mom
It’s the ones with the shopworn “impeach Earl Warren’ sandwich boards who stand out the most.
;)
chris
@NotMax: @Gin & Tonic: Haha! TBH I was hoping he’d give up on you guys and come home to take on Doug Ford in Toronto. Dale’s reporting on Rob ford set the bar for political reporting and no one has done as well since.
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom: All the canvassers were Ds, the state rep and senate were the competitive races in that primary. So there was a friendly rivalry thing. We don’t have too many Rs here. Its not a friendly terrain for them. The area where I live was
a part of the underground railroad and was home to many abolitionists.
schrodingers_cat
@OzarkHillbilly: I have a Spanish sounding last name, and have been mistaken for being Spanish and at other times Mexican, more than once.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@NotMax: I think there are few, if any, reporters in the country with a keener eye for bullshit than Daniel Dale. I’m not worried about him becoming compromised.
Also, fact checking is like 70% of what he does at the Star, and again, few in the country are better at it.
I’m glad for him. The man’s a national treasure. For more than one nation, given that he’s Canadian. Durn furriners taking our jerbs. A fantastic hire on CNN’s part that’s likely to lead to me watching their network a lot more often.
Kay
It’s gratifying to watch it come out because for the first ten years of GOP efforts at voter suppression voting rights advocates were treated as alarmists and were patronizingly told to sit down.
One doesn’t often get proven right as clearly and quickly as voting rights advocates were with Justice Roberts gutting the VRA.
There was an absolute WAVE of voter suppression efforts and then we started to get the cases, where we had actual GOP pols blatantly admitting this is ABOUT stopping certain people from voting.
GOP pols and judges were given the benefit of the doubt so much, to such a degree, that it was ludicrous. I can’t help but think that happened because the targeted groups were deemed less important. The voter supression efforts are racist, but the fact that it took 10 years to prove it, that targeted VOTERS weren’t given the benefit of the doubt, is also an example of structural racism.
It shouldn’t have taken so long. The burden should be on the state, not the individual. Black voters should not have had to PROVE that they have the right to vote and that that right was being infringed. Deliberately. Systematically. By state actors.
Justice Roberts legacy is that he treated black voters cavalierly. He was more interested in protecting state actors than he was in protecting citizens. He turned the burden on its head and he would not have done that if we had been talking about white voters.
Baud
@(((CassandraLeo))):
He’s been excellent, but no one is above being compromised in the right situation.
We’ll have to wait and see.
lumpkin
This is becoming a very ugly and dangerous pattern.
Kay
State voting systems are state recording systems. Conservative voting schemes are bad systems. They use junk information, ludicrous reasoning and they have bad results. For voters. That should have been enough to stop them.
Recording systems serve people, not the other way around. I mean, think about this for a minute. This guy’s whole job is accurately collecting and recording information! WTF? Why should anyone trust any number they put out ever?
People who design systems that have inaccurate results and insist on continuing to do it should be presumed to have malicious intent. They never should have gotten the benefit of the doubt. That shifts the risk to the VOTER.
OzarkHillbilly
@schrodingers_cat: Believe it or not, upon hearing her talk a # of people have asked her if she’s Russian. She has a mostly Catalan accent so I can understand why most folks might not be able to place her but she sounds nothing like a Russian.
NotMax
@(((CassandraLeo)))
Afraid, though, it will quickly deteriorate into a featurette akin to:
“Today’s lies:
Trump says there’s ‘unlimited oil’ on Mars, claims it for U.S.
Dem candidate cites figure of 98%. Real number is 97.9%.
Both are demonstrably false.
Back to you, Wolf.”
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
I was surprised when I first heard Portuguese with how much it sounded like Russian. Not sure I’ve ever heard Catalan.
laura
@Kay: a double whammy, Robert’s applied the wrong standard for a fundamental right from strict scrutiny -with the burden on the state, to rational basis – presuming the state action is valid.
Just umpiring, balls and strikes, nothing to see here….. fuckery.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly:
I knew you were my brother from another mother.
Kay
Also- just so no one forgets. George W Bush was the lead on voter supression efforts. The modern effort took off under him.
The US attorney scandal where his AG resigned? That was ABOUT voter suppression. Still. After that. They were given the benefit of the doubt. For years. How did that happen? Why did we give black voters such a huge burden they had to PROVE after it was blatantly obvious to every rational person what was going on? Why weren’t THEY given the benefit of the doubt instead of George W Bush and John Roberts? They are the voters. They are supposedly what this elections thing is about.
O. Felix Culpa
@satby: I’m afraid I (occasionally and only – of course – justifiably) do scenes too, much to the embarrassment of my sons when they were growing up.
O. Felix Culpa
@Kay:
I know this is a rhetorical question, but I’ll answer it anyway: rhymes with R-A-C-I-S-M.
Steeplejack
@Ohio Mom:
What is ID in “very mild ID”?
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: My wife says it’s closer to French than it is Spanish. Not being a linguist I will take her fluent in 4 languages (Mallorcan, (a dialect of Catalan), Spanish, French, and English) word for it. Sad fact: Growing up in Franco’s Spain she was denied the opportunity to learn the language at school. Tho everybody did it anyway, just speaking Mallorcan/Catalan was against the law. So while she is very fluent in speaking the language she can not write in it. She can read it, but it’s work for her.
NotMax
@Baud
Not even close.
;)
schrodingers_cat
@OzarkHillbilly: With me the misunderstanding has happened before I even opened my mouth. It happens when I am traveling, waiting at airports and such. Spanish and Hispanic women come over and start friendly conversations in Spanish, I have to excuse myself and tell them I can’t speak Spanish. I should learn Spanish, one of these days.
Kay
@laura:
Voting is different. Election law is different because voting is different. First, there’s the harm. The harm can’t be remedied as to that election. If a voter is wrongfully denied we can’t fix that. That election is over. Second, there’s the conundrum with the broader remedy. If they can’t VOTE they can’t REMOVE the politicians who pass laws that suppress their vote.
This matters in laws. If there is no remedy for the immediate offense and then potentially no remedy for the broader offense (passing the laws) then the VOTER should get the benefit of the doubt, because the state has no mechanism to remedy their harm.
John Roberts, America’s Smartest Lawyer, should know this. But he didn’t give a shit. Because it was black people. So he was willing for them to shoulder the risk.
O. Felix Culpa
@Kay:
Roberts was willing – and maybe even intended – for them to be disenfranchised. Feature, not bug.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: Heh. I really do try to avoid them but sometimes….
Back in the mid/late ’90s I had a face off in a Schnucks grocery store with a much younger and larger young black man who was wearing colors. I didn’t even notice them until I found myself standing face to face with him and came to the sinking realization that I. was. all. alone. Seemed like the whole damn store cleared out. The kid finally backed down which in retrospect makes me think he spotted one of the off-duty cops they hired for security coming to intervene, because that 6-1 180/190# kid would have torn my 5-8 150# ass to pieces.
satby
@O. Felix Culpa: I was in a humdinger of one 10 days ago, when a farmer’s market vendor went off on an elderly lady and her younger companion for parking in her “reserved” space. The vendor is a psycho anyway, but she was abusively screaming at the two women (the older one handicapped and using a cane). I went and got the market manager to intervene, which took two tries, and told her to stop being an asshole (those legendary diplomatic skills I haz) because she had blocked their car and was refusing to move it so they could leave.
Did I mention they were black ladies and the vendor was an old white lady? She started screaming at me too. Eventually, they left.
Then she spent the next week complaining about me to the board of directors, trying to get me thrown out of the market as a “troublemaker”.
Ironically, she has no fucking idea just how much of a troublemaker I am.
Kay
@laura:
It’s the basis of election law, this “emergency, pull alarm” mechanism. That’s a recognition that once the harm is done it can’t be remedied. I’ll just give you an example of how seriously this is taken (outside the Supreme Court of the United States)
When Ohio holds a national election a Common Pleas judge is designated in every one of the 88 counties – that judge is “on call” to issue orders regarding polling places. That’s a recognition that once done, the harm can’t be remedied. So the judge has to BE there to issue an order- keep the polling place open, get more ballots, etc. This idea that we can just sit back and you know, SEE if states ACTUALLY suppress votes turns that on its head.
Roberts has a fundamentally wrong concept of what these laws are ABOUT. That’s why he gets it wrong.
NotMax
@,a href=”https://balloon-juice.com/2019/06/05/because-of-course-he-did/#comment-7304655″>Baud
Having at one time or another spoken Spanish, Portuguese and Russian, Russian is more clipped and terse.
As one wag has observed, Portuguese is speaking Spanish with marbles in your mouth.
As per a different wag, people in northern climes speak in a clipped fashion in order to click their teeth together to create heat in their heads.
:)
Anya
You would think his personal experience with adversity has thought him some level of human compassion. What a monster.
OzarkHillbilly
@schrodingers_cat: HA! My wife was at the Arch and over heard 2 guys speaking in Catalan. She got real excited to have the chance to speak in her native tongue and walked over and started talking to them and they looked at her like she had ostriches coming out of her ears. The last thing they were expecting in downtown STL was a fellow Catalan.
NotMax
Fix.
@Baud
Having at one time or another spoken Spanish, Portuguese and Russian, Russian is more clipped and terse.
As one wag has observed, Portuguese is speaking Spanish with marbles in your mouth.
As per a different wag, people in northern climes speak in a clipped fashion in order to click their teeth together to create heat in their heads.
:)
O. Felix Culpa
@satby:
LOL. Good for you for intervening on behalf of those old ladies, though. That’s the best kind of trouble-making.
Belafon
@sherparick: As a Texan, I can say that most Texans aren’t paying enough attention to make informed decisions, or they would have switched to Republicans about 15 years earlier. A lot of Democrats got elected because a lot of people assumed the party they were voting for was the same one they had voted for for the last 20 years.
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
They’ve certainly done a fine job overcompensating for that monster Ann Richards. Three wingnuts, each arguably worse than the previous which, if you think about it, makes Texas seem to have a suicide pact with itself.
NotMax
@satby
Makes perfect sense you’re willing to stand on a soapbox.
;)
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Ouch.
laura
@Kay: I thought Roberts’ ruling were due to his strongly held belief that white male supremacy is the natural order. I view him as the embodiment of white Male resentment of any assertions of equality and power sharing. I keep searching for evidence to the contrary and I’m bracing for the Court’s ruling on the citizenship question on the upcoming census- especially in light of newly revealed evidence from Dr. Hofeller.
I absolutely agree with you about the particular harm on election day and the absence of meaningful remedy. Perhaps feature, not bug.
sdhays
@trollhattan: A town literally exploded due to a failure to regulate and inspect a chemical plant, and they did nothing. Suicide pact is right.
tobie
@NotMax: I’ve never understood how George Papadopoulos’s Italian wife can sound so Russian when she speaks English. No Italian I know has the same accent in English.
Karen
So if your DL shows you were born in the US and you have a foreign name and you’re brown will they disregard your license and demand your birth certificate?
Kay
@laura:
I think he should be asked if he was wrong about the VRA. If the people who said this was malicious and deliberate were right and he was wrong. Because everything that has happened has proved him wrong. MOUNTAINS of evidence.
It’s funny because the same thing is happening with abortion. The “worst case” people? They were RIGHT. But for 30 years they were dismissed and patronized as alarmists. In the case of abortion the laws are actually WORSE than anyone predicted
Betting on the extremism of conservatives is a safe godammned bet. We don’t even have to argue “slippery slope”. They put the worst case in immediately.
Steve in the ATL
@OzarkHillbilly: the good news, I assume, is that there is very little Mallorcan to read in BFE, Missouri?
Steve in the ATL
@Kay: @O. Felix Culpa: you guys are being too cautious. John Roberts’ raison d’être is suppressing likely democratic voters. That has been his entire career.
Sandia Blanca
@tobie: Maybe because she’s not really Italian? Some people are saying . . .
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly: Catalan sounds almost more like Italian to me–I heard a lot of it in Barcelona and Menorca some years ago. In any case, it’s yet another Romance language.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Karen:
More than likely. I remember Trump saying during the campaign that you could tell there were millions of illegal voters because “just look at them”. In other words, there’s some property evident to him that just by looking he can tell a person who doesn’t have the right to vote. What could that property be?
Strangely, I’ve never been personally challenged to vote or prove I’m legal. I say strangely, because my heritage is kind of a complex mongrel mixture but there’s enough hispanic in there that people in Southern Cal, both Mexicans and Anglos, assume I’m a Spanish speaker on sight. I guess the other stuff confuses people, especially here in the east. Lately I get a lot of assumptions about being Arabic, which is actually one of the few things not in the mix.
O. Felix Culpa
@Karen: LOL. Could never happen in this fair land…oh wait.
James E Powell
I’ve never understood why Democrats don’t slam Republicans for their vote suppression. There are talented people who could create tailored ads for the various audiences who still cling to the notion that we are a democracy and the right to vote is a sacred right, a core value of our nation, and one that needs to be defended from the evil Republicans. It is one of several issues on which the Democrats tend to play a “yes, but” Republican-Lite game and hope that the courts will help them out. This has been and will continue to be a losing strategy.
Vote suppression cost us Florida in 2000. That led to two pro-vote suppression supreme court justices. It may have cost in 2016 (many have argued) and what do you know? Two more pro-suppression justices. We are not going to win unless we fight harder and longer than the other guys.
Steve in the ATL
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: As-salaam alaikum!
satby
@NotMax: NMFTG = me.
Have to make a run for more soil for the front bed. Every time I do a project like this I regret not just getting an apartment.
VOR
@schrodingers_cat: My wife’s best friend was born in Malaysia and emigrated to the US when she was less than a year old. She is frequently mistaken for having hispanic heritage.
One year she and a (white) friend were manning an information booth near a polling station. Both women had toddlers with them. Apparently someone complained to the polling authorities that scary people were intimidating voters. A cop came out to check, saw two mothers feeding Goldfish crackers to their toddlers, rolled his eyes, and went back inside.
japa21
To me, purging voter roles should be considered unconstitutional. It is, in effect, stating a person is guilty of illegally voting, or at a minimum being registered to vote, without evidence. There is no presumption of innocence. There is not even notice of the purging given to the voter. That is confiscation of a person’s asset without notice. The voter has no ability to contest the charge. And in fact, the burden of proof is placed on the voter, not on the state. The voter must prove his/her innocence. The state does not have to prove the guilt.
Gin & Tonic
@Karen: Do driver’s licenses typically show birthplace? Mine doesn’t.
bluefoot
@Karen: That’s happened to me when applying for jobs. Last time I was job hunting I got the “We can’t hire anyone who needs a green card” line multiple time even though I was born, raised and lived here my whole life. This happened even when I had my passport with me to fill out application paperwork. And I’m in MA. Not white = not American to a LOT of people.
tokyokie
@OzarkHillbilly: When I go to vote, I not only bring my voter registration card, I bring my driver’s license (proof of address) and my passport (proof of citizenship). I’m consistently told all that is unnecessary, but I do it just in case some GOP asshole wants to fuck with me.
tokyokie
@Kay: I never understood why the voting cases have not been subject to the rational basis review to which other equal rights and fundamental constitutional rights are judged. There is no rational basis to laws intended to curb in-person voter fraud, when such conduct basically doesn’t occur. And measures that disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters in order to thwart the one in a million attempting in-person voting fraud are not drawn as narrowly as possible to advance the legitimate state interest.
Under the rational basis test, all of these matters should be deemed unconstitutional. Which I guess answers my question as to why it hasn’t been applied.
tokyokie
@Baud:
I always thought that Portuguese sounded like Italian with a French accent.
Anyway, one summer when I was working in the North Sea as a timekeeper, Spaniards, mostly Catalonian, performed the manual labor jobs, although we had a few Basques and Portuguese. (The Portuguese were former colonists in Angola and Mozambique and had long served in the military and were not to be trifled with.) We had a timekeeper from South America (an ethnic Chinese from Peru) who acted as an interpreter when these guys came into the office with pay disputes. The Catalonians and the Peruvian translator could understand each other perfectly well, but none of them could understand the Basques. So whenever one of them came in with a pay dispute, we’d have to find one of the Portuguese (most of whom spoke some English), because the Portuguese, speaking Portuguese, and the Basques, speaking Spanish, could understand each other. Go figure.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Roberts only concern was and has always been the consolidation of Republican Power into an iron fist.
The Supreme Court’s final traces of legitimacy died on his watch.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
He will talk about his big white balls and strikes. And the glorious white home plate.
And at no point in time will he ever admit he was wrong.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid decided it was in the nation’s best interests to “look forward, not back” during the brief period we had majority control of Congress.
Essentially trading the ACA and trying to save a crashing economy for the voting rights of the most loyal Democratic voters.
And we have all seen how this worked out.
burnspbesq
@TenguPhule:
You’re so fucking smart, explain to the tens of millions of Americans who got affordable healthcare out of that decision what you would have done differently.
Steve in the ATL
@tokyokie:
Because the court is highly political and not acting with integrity or in good faith
rikyrah
@MomSense:
Not a phucking one.
You are absolutely on point ??