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Trump Establishes Voter Fraud Commission

I don't remember seeing this story about Kobach. Essentially, he was the monorail guy from The Simpsons going around convincing small towns to pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars to convince them to draft anti-immigration legislation and defend it in court when they inevitably got sued.

[h=1]Kris Kobach’s Lucrative Trail of Courtroom Defeats[/h] [h=2]For years, the candidate for Kansas governor has defended towns that passed anti-immigration ordinances. The towns have lost big — but Kobach has fared considerably better.[/h]

https://www.propublica.org/article/kris-kobachs-lucrative-trail-of-courtroom-defeats

But “victory” isn’t the word most Valley Park residents would use to describe the results of Kobach’s work. With his help, the town of 7,000 passed an ordinance in 2006 that punished employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them. But after two years of litigation and nearly $300,000 in expenses, the ordinance was largely gutted. Now, it is illegal only to “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants there — something that was already illegal under federal law. The town’s attorney can’t recall a single case brought under the ordinance.
“Ambulance chasing” is how Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, describes Kobach’s role. Young characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”
Kobach used his work in Valley Park to attract other clients, with sometimes disastrous effects on the municipalities. The towns — some with budgets in the single-digit-millions — ran up hefty legal costs after hiring him to defend similar ordinances. Farmers Branch, Texas, wound up owing $7 million in legal bills. Hazleton, Penn., took on debt to pay $1.4 million and eventually had to file for a state bailout. In Fremont, Neb., the city raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services. None of the towns are currently enforcing the laws he helped craft.
“This sounds a little bit to me like Harold Hill in ‘The Music Man,’” said Larry Dessem, a law professor at the University of Missouri who focuses on legal ethics. “Got a problem here in River City and we can solve it if you buy the band instruments from me. He is selling something that goes well beyond legal services.”
Kobach rode the attention the cases generated to political prominence, first as Kansas secretary of state, and now as a candidate for governor in the Republican primary on Aug. 7. He also earned more than $800,000 for his immigration work, paid by both towns and an advocacy group, over 13 years.
Kobach’s recent legal struggles have been widely reported. In June, a federal judge handed him a sweeping courtroom defeat, overturning a Kansas law that required proof of citizenship to register to vote. The judge went so far as to order him to attend six hours of continuing legal education after he repeatedly botched basic courtroom procedure. Another recent Kobach endeavor, a federal commission aimed at combating voter fraud, which he co-chaired, shut down after a bevy of lawsuits challenged it.


But “victory” isn’t the word most Valley Park residents would use to describe the results of Kobach’s work. With his help, the town of 7,000 passed an ordinance in 2006 that punished employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them. But after two years of litigation and nearly $300,000 in expenses, the ordinance was largely gutted. Now, it is illegal only to “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants there — something that was already illegal under federal law. The town’s attorney can’t recall a single case brought under the ordinance.
“Ambulance chasing” is how Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, describes Kobach’s role. Young characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”
Kobach used his work in Valley Park to attract other clients, with sometimes disastrous effects on the municipalities. The towns — some with budgets in the single-digit-millions — ran up hefty legal costs after hiring him to defend similar ordinances. Farmers Branch, Texas, wound up owing $7 million in legal bills. Hazleton, Penn., took on debt to pay $1.4 million and eventually had to file for a state bailout. In Fremont, Neb., the city raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services. None of the towns are currently enforcing the laws he helped craft.
“This sounds a little bit to me like Harold Hill in ‘The Music Man,’” said Larry Dessem, a law professor at the University of Missouri who focuses on legal ethics. “Got a problem here in River City and we can solve it if you buy the band instruments from me. He is selling something that goes well beyond legal services.”
Kobach rode the attention the cases generated to political prominence, first as Kansas secretary of state, and now as a candidate for governor in the Republican primary on Aug. 7. He also earned more than $800,000 for his immigration work, paid by both towns and an advocacy group, over 13 years.
Kobach’s recent legal struggles have been widely reported. In June, a federal judge handed him a sweeping courtroom defeat, overturning a Kansas law that required proof of citizenship to register to vote. The judge went so far as to order him to attend six hours of continuing legal education after he repeatedly botched basic courtroom procedure. Another recent Kobach endeavor, a federal commission aimed at combating voter fraud, which he co-chaired, shut down after a bevy of lawsuits challenged it.


When Kobach was hired by Farmers Branch in 2007, then-Mayor Bob Phelps said Kobach cited his anticipated victory in Valley Park as a selling point. The city council, Phelps said, “bought it hook, line and sinker.”
In Hazleton, Valley Park’s results were cited as a reason for optimism. Both Kobach and Lou Barletta — then mayor of Hazleton and now the area’s congressman — used the town as a reason to press on with their costly litigation. “Valley Park has a similar ordinance that was modeled after ours,” Barletta told a local reporter at the time. “They were also sued. They went to federal court and won.” Neither he nor Kobach mentioned in the interview that Valley Park’s ordinance, ultimately, looked very little like Hazleton’s.
Albertville, Ala. chose to do a bit of homework on Kobach, and it paid off. When Kobach arrived in the town in March 2010, he painted a bleak picture of its future: He said he’d been all over the country helping towns that were suffering from an influx of illegal immigrants. Albertville, he continued, was more afflicted than any he’d seen. He predicted it would collapse under the weight of the influx. Kobach said he could help them.
As he’d done in Valley Park, Kobach said, he would write an ordinance that would force the illegal immigrants to leave. “There are certain things that cities can do to deal with the burden that illegal immigration imposes on the taxpayers,” Kobach told municipal officials at a public meeting, a local paper reported. He dismissed concerns over potential legal challenges and their high costs. The American Civil Liberties Union, he said, had a track record of losing cases like these.
Albertville’s government was poised to hire Kobach until a city councilmember made a call to Valley Park. After hearing first-hand about the town’s experience, Albertville’s city council voted against bringing him on. “The advice I have gotten from towns which passed similar resolutions said they would not do it again,” councilman Randy Amos said after the vote.

And Kobach was the guy who came up with one of Romney's dumbest ideas:

Two years later, while simultaneously defending cities and serving as an elected official, Kobach assumed his most prominent role yet: immigration adviser to presidential candidate Mitt Romney. His main contribution was the notion that immigrants should “self-deport.” The idea was so widely panned that the Romney campaign distanced itself, labeling Kobach a supporter, not an adviser.

Valley Park had hardly any immigrants to speak of at the time Kobach was called in. The town’s Hispanic population had ticked up from 2 percent of the population to around 3 percent in 2006. That amounted to an increase of about 50 people in a town of 7,000.
That was enough for the town’s then mayor, Jeff Whitteaker. He took to local media to fulminate about overcrowding. “You got one guy and his wife that settle down here, have a couple kids, and before long you have Cousin Puerto Rico and Taco Whoever moving in,” Whitteaker told the Riverfront Times.
He championed an immigration ordinance and advocated hiring Kobach. Valley Park and Hazleton both passed ordinances within days of each other in July 2006.
The ACLU had warned both towns that they’d face lawsuits if the ordinances passed, and the organization quickly followed through on the threat.
Hazleton lost decisively. The city of fewer than 30,000 people was defeated both at the trial court level and on appeal. Its ordinance never went into effect.
Even then, Kobach maintained a serene confidence. By 2013, seven years into the litigation, a privately raised legal defense fund that had paid Hazleton’s bills (including $250,000 for Kobach’s fees) had run dry. The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to hear the city’s case. The ACLU had asked an appeals court to order Hazleton to reimburse it for $2.4 million in attorneys fees.
Despite that, Kobach told the Hazleton paper, the Standard Speaker, that the city shouldn’t expect many more substantial legal bills. “At this stage of the game, costs are much lower for both sides,” he said, adding that “they are minuscule costs as opposed to costs at the front end of a lawsuit.”
That may have been true to the extent that he was describing his own fees. But a year later, Hazleton was ordered to pay the ACLU $1.4 million to cover its attorneys’ fees. At the time, the town was already $6 million in debt. It was forced to take on additional loans to pay the bills.
By the end, in March 2015, Kobach acknowledged that Hazleton was in financial distress. In a court filing, he told the judge the city simply could not afford to pay the ACLU’s fees.
“An award of the full amount of fees and costs sought by the Plaintiffs, or even half that amount, in one lump sum would likely be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and drives the city into bankruptcy and Act 47 receivership,” he wrote, mentioning the process in Pennsylvania that allows the state to take over the finances of insolvent towns.
The judge rejected the plea. “Municipalities, regardless of their fiscal health, have no discretion to enact improper laws,” he wrote.
Hazleton was declared financially distressed in September 2017 by the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development and entered into a recovery plan with the state.
City officials deny that the $1.4 million payment to the ACLU forced their hand, but it was a significant sum for a municipality that in 2017 took in $9.5 million in revenue.
 
Or if you'd prefer the story in musical format:



Fun fact, the small-town mayor in the first part, Lou Barletta, is now the Republican nominee for Senate in PA.
 
Let's call Iowa Republicans' elections bill what it is: Another push for voter suppression

The bill would block students at state universities from voting early on campus. The ban on hosting satellite voting stations in state-owned buildings would extend to the Iowa Veterans Home.

Two satellite voting sites on the University of Iowa campus have given students an opportunity to register to vote and cast ballots early. More than 2,000 people voted early at those sites on the campus in the 2018 general election. They were overwhelmingly Democrats.
 
Public buildings should be where we vote, not churches.
 
Yet another Republican who doesn’t want to safeguard elections from interference. Wonder why?
 
Court keeps Indiana voter registration purge law on hold

The Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Tuesday a federal judge’s ruling last year blocking the Indiana law from taking effect. That law would’ve allowed local election authorities to immediately purge voter registrations if the program called Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck found a duplicate registration in another state for that person.

Common Cause Indiana maintained the Crosscheck system started by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was unreliable.

The ruling says Indiana law wrongly allowed registration purges without voter notification. The court also faulted the law for equating voting in two states with being registered to vote in multiple states.
 
Its engrained in Republicans that Democrats have to be more corrupt than they are. So when they hear a voter rights advocate voted three times, they’re so dumb they can’t comprehend someone voting in three different elections.
 
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It’s only fraud if it’s a Democrat
 
Trump is worried that Russia can't cheat enough for him. So, he's cheating here himself.
 
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