New Orleans In a new adaptation of the old saw, it turns out that if you live by the tweet, you also die by the tweet. President Trump gave birth to his fake voter commission with a tweet as he tried to explain away his three million vote loss to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Recently, he killed the same commission with another tweet. Of course, with the President there’s never just one tweet involved without strafing every living thing around it with blame and retribution. A tweet never tells the whole story or often the real story either, and that’s also the case of killing this commission and its zombie afterlife in the hopes and imagination of Kris Kobach, the obsessive far-right governor-wannabe Secretary of State in Kansas.
The real reason that the Trump-Kobach voter witch hunt died rests solely on their feet. First, to no surprise, they couldn’t really find any evidence of voter fraud, which was no surprise because endless studies have been done previously with the same result. Secondly, Kobach put a dagger in the heart of the commission by claiming massive, game changing voter fraud in New Hampshire in advance of a commission hearing based on his misinterpretation of state law allowing students to register as voters where they went to school, lived and worked most of the year. Thirdly, the New Hampshire representative on the commission predictably went crazy over the Kobach’s claim that there had been massive voter fraud on his watch, and when Kobach and his cronies tried to freeze him out of commission minutes, information, correspondence, he filed suit to force transparency, and won the suit. And, finally, Kobach and his buddies tried to use the commission to force states around the country, who have the responsibility to run the elections, to turn over all their data, including voting histories, social security numbers, etc, many of which were blocked by local state law in both red and blue states. Bottom line, twelve states told him and the commission to go play in DC traffic and keep out of their lane. Reportedly, the titular head of the commission, Vice President Mike Pence had washed his hands of it all because of all of the mess, and most other politicians with any sense had steered clear of this runaway disaster.
The zombie-UFO hunting Kobach is still in the game, or at least so he claims to be as an adviser to the Department of Homeland Security in the hopes that he can prove that undocumented folks were voters. Hopefully, that’s just a face-saver and not a real program. Kobach’s own UFO-voter search in Kansas has yielded nine cases, most of which were elderly Republicans who made the mistake of voting twice.
It’s never over until it’s over, and since this is a huge political effort to prove a negative and find something that’s just not there, it may never end, but at least we have caught a break for a minute.