A Third Strike for Obama at the EAC

Yesterday, President Obama nominated Kate Marshall to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). A brief review of his previous nominations seems to be in order. All too often the Democrats consider election administration in a partisan fashion, seeking to advance a political agenda or scare their base.  

President Obama seemingly believed such when he nominated the hyper-partisan liberal extremist Myrna Perez previously.  As we wrote at the time:

It is hard to imagine a person less suited for a commission whose job is to be “independent, bipartisan commission charged with developing guidance to meet HAVA requirements” than Ms. Perez.  Some of the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA’s, requirements were for states to update their voting rolls.  An effort which Ms. Perez has long opposed calling such efforts “list purging” with made up statistics and overheated rhetoric.  An example of the latter is Ms. Perez once said: “purging happens all across the country, probably every day.” 

To election officials of both parties that statement is ridiculous but it is the kind of extremist rhetoric that Ms. Perez has been spouting for years against Republicans and Democrats who try to enforce laws on voting that the far left opposes.  In Ms. Perez’s world such Republicans and Democrats are racists or fear mongers. 

According to Perez, Secretaries of State and other election officials spend their time trying to remove people from the voting rolls.  Such rhetoric and her extreme partisanship resulted in Perez being forced to withdraw her name.  

President Obama replaced Perez's nomination with Matthew Butler. Butler was the former CEO of Media Matters. While Perez was a partisan extremist on election issues, Butler had no experience at all on election issues.  He is now the Chief of Staff for the Democratic National Convention. In other words, he was only a partisan.  

Which brings us to the current nominee, Kate Marshall. She similarly has no election administration background. (Although unlike Butler, at least she "applied" for such a position when she ran unsuccessfully for Nevada Secretary of State.)

And that is how the Democrats view the EAC: a place to reward partisans for their service to the liberal movement. It is sad that the left has so little regard for election administration.

Does a Life of Partisanship Equate to Being Qualified for the EAC?

As you might remember, President Obama’s choice for the Election Assistance Commission, Myrna Perez, withdrew her nomination last week.  In his place, he nominated Matthew Butler.

While Ms. Perez suffered from overtly partisan ideas and beliefs on voter ID, among other things, Mr. Butler’s nomination is not much better. He has been involved in partisan politics, and has no actual election administration experience to draw on.

Mr. Butler was the CEO of Media Matters for America, a progressive organization that is

Dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

As part of his position with MMFA, Butler opined,

We need strong progressive voices advocating for all of our policy priorities.

In that same interview, Butler stated,

Countering all the misinformation that comes out of right wing media is really tough.  That's why the Media Matters team is 86 people covering the news 24-7 and responding to every point we can get to on mediamatters.org.

Overall, Matt Butler does not seem to be a good fit for the Election Assistance Commission, as his experience is largely in partisan politics.  The EAC is supposed to be independent and bipartisan in assisting America in running our elections.  Matt Butler does not seem to be a good fit for such a position.

Victory and Defeat for Open, Fair, and Honest Elections

While Republicans see the administration of elections as a non-partisan process to be performed in accordance with the rule of law, we have long contended that some far left Democrats see election administration as a way to race bait and fear monger in a desperate effort to scare the liberal base into voting.  The leaders in this effort include the Brennan Center which has recently been rebuked on the left by the likes of liberal law Professor Rick Hasen and the New York Times. 

The Brennan Center’s most visible spokesperson on election issues has been Myrna Perez.  Ms. Perez has made outlandish statements that such activities as cleaning up the voting lists are “vote purging” that  “happens every day”, that 1.2 million people don’t have ID in Texas, and much more. 

For her years of effort of carrying the Democrats water on these issues she was rewarded with a nomination to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC).   RNLA and others interested in fair and honest elections vehemently and vociferously opposed her nomination. 

She has been proven factually wrong again and again but that never mattered.  That is until today.  She has withdrawn her nomination to the EAC. 

We hope this is not just a rejection of her but of the organization that gives her a platform, the Brennan Center. 

However, while we won the battle, we have not won the war.   Her replacement, Matt Butler, is even being questioned for partisanship by the left.  Like most liberal “experts” on voting, he has no experience in working in election administration. 

Today was a victory for open, fair and honest elections with the withdrawal of Ms. Perez.  However, the war is not over as President Obama has nominated another person who seemingly has little interest in election administration. There are literally dozens of current and former Democrat election administrators and experts who would be qualified to help lead a commission whose responsibility it is, at least in theory, to “assist” state and local election officials and voters. Is Butler really qualified for such a task? What are his qualifications other than being an activist progressive Democrat?  As Doug Chapin writes:

At this point, it would appear that the Democrats have made the decision to trade a potentially controversial (and therefore problematic) pick for on that is lower-profile, albeit just as partisan.

More on Butler later, however, his nomination at first blush seems to prove why it is time to end the EAC.

Obomanation: A Political Demagogue Should Not be a Voting Commissioner

Generally when one is nominated for a commission, judgeship or other government position for a job that can stir controversy but serves the entire public, the nominee stays out of the limelight in that field.  At the very least, the nominee stays out of areas of blatant partisanship and does not use inflammatory rhetoric when one is nominated to work on a bipartisan commission. 

This rule is not being just broken but shattered by Myrna Perez, a nominee to be a Commissioner for the Election Assistance Commission.  As we detailed in our opposition letter, Ms. Perez has a long history of partisanship and playing fast and loose with the facts.  Recently she has taken this to new levels on the subject of Voter ID.

Instead of trying to work with groups to help publicize the multiple free ID options to voters, Ms. Perez has been fear mongering with ridiculous and groundless claims like saying people have to choose between eating and voting because of ID requirements. 

(The irony of the last statement is that Ms. Perez is in effect denying people some social services, such as those of the courts, over the counter medicines, and much more that often require some form of identification.  It seems she is in favor of oppressing the poor to make a rhetorical political point over helping them obtain a free ID.)

Wait there is more, according to Ms. Perez:

• “at least 1.2 million” in Texas don’t have IDs, a number so incredible that not ever her own side’s biased statisticians think the number is anywhere near that high.
• ’Here was an issue when a state enacted this kind of restriction on right to vote for the purpose of discriminating against racial minorities,’ said Myrna Pérez, a Brennan Center for Justice attorney.”  (Ms. Perez, other than you and a few on the far left, no one has ever said that or believes that.  Actually voter ID will help many minorities who are often the victims of vote fraud and effectively disenfranchised by fraudulent votes.  For just a few Texas examples check http://rnla.org/votefraud.asp and search for Texas.)

Ms. Perez is not alone in making these spurious allegations.  But she is the only one who has been nominated to a commission to assist with voting that is making these sort of comments. 

President Obama should immediately withdraw Ms. Perez’s nomination, his failure to do so is another Obomanation.

EAC's Bad Apple

Lost in all the news yesterday was the White House announcement of the Republican Commissioner Nominees for the Election Assistance Commission(EAC).  Congratulations to Mr. Masterson and Ms. McCormick.  Now the EAC has four nominees for a full commission. 

However, one of these nominees sticks out as not just unqualified, but an incredible partisan without any interest in improving our election process.  That nominee is Myrna Perez. 

Ms. Perez is such an extremist that she has taken positions in opposition to the President’s own Commission on Election Administration (PCEA).  PCEA came out in favor of “list maintenance,” or keeping accurate and up to date voter rolls.  Perez regularly calls such good election practices “list purging” that happens “probably every day.”  Fear mongering important bipartisan efforts such as list maintenance to aid the Democrat Party is wrong for anyone 

involved in elections, let alone a national commission on elections.  

Another purpose of the EAC is to collect accurate information on elections.  Ms. Perez has been caught in rampant exaggerations in the past and is quite frankly not reliable. 

Most damming, she has never worked as an election official.  Her background is built on working for vote-fraud denier and pro-Democrat party groups like the Brennan Center.  Contrast that with the Republican nominees, who have spent their careers working in a non-partisan fashion for open fair and honest elections. 

To be clear, RNLA’s opposition to Perez is not based on her being a Democrat.  We do not oppose her fellow Democrat nominee.  We oppose her because she is an unqualified partisan extremist.

If the President is serious about the EAC, then he should immediately withdraw Perez’s nomination.  

How Democrats Try to Win a Republican Primary: Crying Wolf on Intimidation

Today, the small election law community is going crazy over the Republican Senate runoff in Mississippi.  Unlike the rest of the political world that is concerned with the result, the liberal election law community is concerned with intimidation in the Republican primary.

 

Don’t get me wrong, Republicans are very concerned with intimidation.  That is why Republicans and conservatives highlight it when it happens, such as when pair of New Black Panther Party members in para military uniforms wave a Billy Club in front of a polling place.  The Democrat position on the surface is the same, but in reality is hypocritical in the extreme.  While even at least one career Democrat prosecutor at the Department of Justice agreed that the New Black Panther Party members’ actions were an open and shut case of intimidation worthy of prosecution, Democrat party officials in Pennsylvania felt the opposite.  They rewarded one of the pair with a Democrat party position. 

This is relevant for Mississippi because of the differing views on intimidation.  All the conservative and Republican poll watcher/challenger training that I have attended has conveyed the same message:  You are either there just to observe, OR you bring your concerns to the election officials. There is NEVER a circumstance where you confront a voter in the polling place. 

This is not to say that I don’t understand what the left is thinking when they worry about intimidation of voters, it is what they attempt to do.  If the situation where reversed, at least some Democrat Party officials would be there intimidating Republicans if history is any guide.  Just this week it came out that a Democrat in Washington State was trying to intimidate Republican voters in Florida in 2012 with official sounding letters. 

To be clear, I am not talking about isolated examples such as the New Black Panthers or a single person in Washington but the efforts of the Democrat party in places like Virginia, arguably the most political and the second most targeted state in the 2012 election.  While all the Republicans\Conservatives I know emphasize in their training that you do not speak directly with a voter, the Democrats in Virginia in 2012 where suing for the right to confront voters inside the polling place!

Of course Democrats don’t call their actions confronting or intimidating voters but rather “assisting” voters in polling places.  However, the court in Virginia in 2012 rejected the Democrats’ request because it felt, correctly, that inside a polling place is no place for partisan activists to be confronting voters. 

So today, MSNBC will likely trot out someone who committed vote fraud himself, Al Sharpton, to discuss how Republicans/conservatives are allegedly intimidating voters in a Republican Primary.  Hey, it is a good thing to do if you're a liberal activist.  Not only has Sharpton been rewarded with a primetime TV slot for his pro-intimidation/fraud efforts, but so are liberal activists.  For example, the Brennan Center’s Myrna Perez was rewarded for her career of crying wolf and wildly exaggerating on non-existent  intimidation and list purging claims with a nomination to be one of two Democrat Commissioners on the Federal commission overseeing aspects of voting, the Election Assistance Commission. 

While Democrats interested in election law outside of Mississippi are going to focus on ginning up non-existent stories of intimidation by poll watchers who are in reality observing the elections, Republicans interested in election law are going to be hoping for an honest election.   

Obomination: The Latest Liberal Effort in their War Against Accurate Voter Rolls

We pointed out previously the hypocrisy of the Democrats efforts opposing list maintenance or efforts to keep accurate voter rolls despite the recent Presidential Commission’s Report on Election Administration supporting such efforts.  The latest example of this hypocrisy is the nomination by President Obama of Myrna Perez to be a commissioner for the Elections Assistance Commission(EAC)  Her views are so extreme, the RNLA has decided to take the unusual position of formally opposing her nomination. 

It is hard to imagine a person less suited for a commission whose job is to be “independent, bipartisan commission charged with developing guidance to meet HAVA requirements” than Ms. Perez.  Some of the Help America Vote Act ,or HAVA’s, requirements were for states to update their voting rolls.  An effort which Ms. Perez has long opposed calling such efforts “list purging” with made up statistics and overheated rhetoric.  An example of the latter is Ms. Perez once said: “purging happens all across the country, probably every day.”

To election officials of both parties that statement is ridiculous but it is the kind of extremist rhetoric that Ms. Perez has been spouting for years against Republicans and Democrats who try to enforce laws on voting that the far left opposes.  In Ms. Perez’s world such Republicans and Democrats are racists or fear mongers. 

As our opposition letter details, Ms. Perez has regularly been guilty of gross exaggeration.  This type of rhetoric for an agency that is to work on a bipartisan basis is completely inappropriate.

President Obama’s nomination of Ms. Perez to be an EAC Commissioner should be rejected by Senators of both parties who value open fair and honest elections.  

Obomination: An Ultra Partisan Nominee for an Agency the President Once Tried to Defund

In his fiscal year 2012 Budget President Obama proposed to “zero out” the Election Assistance Commission’s grant funding.  As the President’s budget stated:

The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) administers Federal election administration grant funding to the States under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). Election Reform Grants are used to fund new and upgraded voting machines and support implementation of HAVA-mandated voter registration databases. Additional Federal funds are not needed to accomplish the purposes of HAVA since over $3 billion in Federal funds have been provided to the States since 2002, of which approximately $1 billion remains unspent as of September 2009. Besides eliminating unnecessary Federal spending, by providing no new Federal funding in 2012, States will be incentivized to spend current balances on HAVA-mandated programs to achieve State priorities for elections reform.

The House Administration Committee went a step further and has passed legislation to end the EAC, which has accomplished its mission and outlived its usefulness. 

However, it looks like now the President needs the EAC to do his dirty work again.  Since the IRS scandals happened and the IRS has presumably stopped targeting right-of-center groups, he needs a new agency to attack Republicans and conservatives.  Don’t forgot when demonizing the Supreme Court over Citizens United and attacking the Federal Election Commission failed to oppress free speech in elections by Republicans, President Obama even tried to get the Securities and Exchange Commission involved in the election intimidation business.  President Obama has been caught trying to damage our electoral process in a multitude of ways.

Now it looks as if he is going to try to revive the EAC in his latest efforts.   Last Friday, President Obama nominated Myrna Perez as a commissioner to the Election Assistance Commission.  Ms. Perez has not only long been associated with arguably the most partisan of outside groups that if the IRS was truly doing its job it would have investigated for partisanship, she has been one of the Brennan Center’s most extreme members.   Some of Ms. Perez’s views include:

·         Not only opposing Voter ID, but proposing being able to vote with an OUT OF STATE driver’s license in an election

·         Opposing list maintenance of any type and even participated in efforts to stop Florida and Colorado from doing virtually any form of list maintenance.  List maintenance was a key component of HAVA, the legislation for which the EAC was created.

·         Favors counting ILLEGAL ALIENS in the census.

Here’s the kicker, Ms. Perez has ZERO election administration experience.  The only reason to appoint Perez is to further the President’s war on open fair and honest elections.  Ms. Perez is a liberal hack for whom no Democrat position is too extreme. 

The President was on the right track in 2012 and should join the House in 2013 by eliminating the EAC.