voting rights
“You’re not here to advocate, you’re not here to trash the advocate, you’re not here to argue with me.”
That was Judge Julie Robinson just now, upbraiding Kobach witness Jesse Richman, for interrupting her and the ACLU’s lawyer, Tierney Sneed reports.
Richman is the “expert” whose study of non-citizen voting was cited by the White House to support Trump’s false claim that he would have won the popular vote if it weren’t for millions of illegal votes.
The Voter Fraud Bamboozling Trainwreck
A truly epic week on the voting rights front.
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It sounds like voter fraud huckster Hans von Spakovsky’s claims about rampant illegal voting were given the thorough debunking they deserve by the ACLU’s Dale Ho during the trial over Kansas’s proof of citizenship law Friday.
Tierney Sneed reports:
Ho moved on from the report itself to claims that von Spakovsky — and Kobach — have made in op-eds, that Somali nationals voting illegally tipped a state legislative race in Missouri.
A state court ruling found that there was no fraud in the race.
Von Spakovsky said he “was not aware of that” when he wrote his op-ed. Asked if he attempted to retract the claim, von Spakovsky said he didn’t recall when he found out.
That’s kind of how it went.
So last September, a reporter asked Hans von Spakovsky — one of the leaders of the conservative push to hype voter fraud — whether he was the sender of an email that said putting Democrats or mainstream Republicans on Trump’s voter fraud commission would lead to its “abject failure.”
Von Spakoskvy denied it. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.
Hours later, it was revealed that von Spakovsky had indeed sent the email. He later claimed, implausibly, that he was confused because the reporter had phrased her question imprecisely.
And now, Tierney Sneed reports, the whole embarrassing episode is being entered into evidence to impeach von Spakovsky’s credibility as a witness in the trial over Kansas’s strict voter registration law. Including the transcript of the reporter’s audio recording, in which von Spakovsky falsely denies sending the email.