News from Brownbackistan - Voting Rights Vigilance

[deminks]

http://www.kansas.com/opinion/editorials/article30181449.html

Thursday’s 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act is cause for celebration. But caution also is in order, as the right to vote recently has been eroded by state laws inspired by an unfounded fear of voter fraud, including in Kansas.

The law’s passage and signing by President Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965, concluded a horrific sequence of events, including the murders of voting-rights activists in Mississippi and law enforcement’s violent response to a peaceful march in Selma, Ala. In prohibiting the poll taxes, literacy tests and other harassment that had denied blacks the right to vote, the law newly guaranteed them full citizenship and enabled the civic and political participation that led to the election of an African-American president.

(snip)

And rather than try to keep Kobach in check, the Legislature and Gov. Sam Brownback just empowered him to prosecute voter fraud himself. Kobach said this week that he was preparing to bring the first cases of voter fraud in September and October.

Not surprisingly, the Kansas Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission voted last week to hold hearings early next year about whether the state’s strict new voter law suppresses voter turnout in some communities, as a 2014 Government Accountability Office study had suggested. Many Kansans also are suspicious of Kobach’s refusal to allow a Wichita statistician to do an audit of the accuracy of Sedgwick County’s voting machines. He’s making her sue to try to get the data.

(end snip)

Kansas - the grand Koch Oligarchy experiment. Coming to a state near you. Sponsored by the US Supreme Court.

[RKP5637]

1. As so many Americans snooze to events like this as the Koch machine marches forward. n/t

Kansas - the grand Koch Oligarchy experiment. Coming to a state near you. Sponsored by the US Supreme Court.

[Gothmog]

2. Kobach is an idiot who could not find voter fraud right under his nose