I thought Republicans were against big government lists?
This....which is why no one should have voted for Trump in the first place. He isn't a conservative, he is a fascist. The point may be that the Republican party is no longer concerned about being conservative. Right now it doesn't seem so at least at the top of the ticket. I am hoping (against odds I might add) that Trump is a good wake up call for the party and that we will steer a different course when we aren't under Trump's thumb.
Case in point. How do you reason with this?
Hans von Spakovsky, a member of the FEC nominated by former President George W. Bush, will join the presidential commission to investigate instances of voter fraud during the 2016 presidential election.
Von Spakovsky has been an ardent proponent of toughening voting laws for years, asserting the potential for massive voter fraud. But his push has drawn significant criticism from Democrats over the years, who have accused him of pushing measures that restrict voting rights.
He received a recess appointment to the FEC in 2006 but ultimately withdrew from the formal nominating process in 2008 amid vocal opposition from Democrats.
Mainstream election experts say that Spakovsky has had an improbably large impact. Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, and the author of a recent book, “The Voting Wars,” says, “Before 2000, there were some rumblings about Democratic voter fraud, but it really wasn’t part of the main discourse. But thanks to von Spakovsky and the flame-fanning of a few others, the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections, has become part of the Republican orthodoxy.”
Von Spakovsky recently sat down with me in a conference room at the Heritage Foundation, wearing rimless eyeglasses and a sports jacket with a crisp white pocket square. In our conversation, and in later phone calls and e-mails, he expressed himself with lawyerly reserve. He said of True the Vote and its affiliates, “They’re doing a great job.” Earlier this year, he noted, the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1.8 million people who had died were still registered to vote in America, and that 2.75 million people were registered to vote in multiple states. How many of these errors translate into fraudulent votes? “It is impossible to answer,” he said. “We don’t have the tools in place.” But he cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. “That seems pretty substantial to me,” he said.
He did not mention that the article’s findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State’s office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn’t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical.
But in an unusual turn, the department filed a new amicus brief Monday arguing that the purges of voters are legal under federal law. This brief, unlike the prior one, was not signed by career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division.
State and local Republicans have expanded early voting in GOP-dominated areas and restricted it in Democratic areas, an IndyStar investigation has found, prompting a significant change in Central Indiana voting patterns.
From 2008 to 2016, GOP officials expanded early voting stations in Republican dominated Hamilton County, IndyStar's analysis found, and decreased them in the state's biggest Democratic hotbed, Marion County.
Again, in 2014 and 2016, Democrats attempted to expand early voting in Marion County, but were stopped by the Republican member of the election board. Most recently, Republican Maura Hoff, by proxy, cast a vote against expanded early voting sites. Hoff did not respond to emails, phone calls and written requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Hamilton County added two additional early voting stations in 2016, giving it one station for every 100,000 voters, as opposed to one for more than 700,000 voters in Marion County. The results were significant.
The number of in-person absentee ballots cast in Hamilton County rose from 32,729 in 2008 to 53,608 in 2016, representing a 63 percent increase. At the same time, there was a 26 percent decrease in Marion County, from 93,316 to 68,599. During that period, the percentage of absentee ballots rose from 25 percent to 34 percent in Hamilton County, and fell from 24 percent to 19 percent in Marion County.
The Fascist Fox News Channel and right wing fake news takes is ruining our country.