Leftists Smear Election-Integrity Advocates as ‘Mainstream Faces of Hate’

The left-wing website The American Prospect on Thursday likened members of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan — only with “suits and ties.”

The website — the same one to which Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen Bannon gave an interview just before his dismissal from his White House post — published an article on the Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, titled “The Mainstream Faces of Hate.”

“For most Americans, it’s instinctual to reject those who wave Ku Klux Klan–style torches or banners bearing swastikas,” the article states. “But what about the racists who boast law degrees and sparkling resumes, and sport suits and ties? These haters, too, have flourished in the Trump administration.”

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The article accuses the so-called haters of pursuing “policies of bigotry, safely cloaked behind mainstream-sounding think tanks and federal commissions.”

Among the members of the election commission, the Prospect singles out two — Vice Chairman Kris Kobach, who is the secretary of state in Kansas; and J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department lawyer who serves as president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF).

The offered evidence of racial animus is weak. The Prospect points to Kobach’s efforts to require proof of citizenship from people registering to vote in Kansas and PILF’s efforts to force elections officials to comply with federal law requiring them to maintain accurate voter rolls.

“It’s a giant distraction,” said Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for PILF.

Churchwell said critics of his organization and Adams have trouble debating the issue on the merits. Federal law requires proper maintenance of the rolls to ensure that dead and ineligible voters do not remain on lists. The law also gives private citizens the right to go to court to force compliance.

When they are unable to mount an argument on the facts, Churchwell said, “All you have left is somebody just trying to put the brakes on this commission. They protest too much.”

It is not the first time Adams’ critics have accused him of racial bias. Churchwell noted that the NAACP cited the organization’s use of illustrated space aliens in a report documenting voting by noncitizens in Virginia.

“The American Prospect is probably the first to call us white-collar Nazis, but there are Obama [administration] alumni that are pushing the exact same thing, maybe with nicer rhetoric.”

“The American Prospect is probably the first to call us white-collar Nazis, but there are Obama [administration] alumni that are pushing the exact same thing, maybe with nicer rhetoric,” he said.

Progressives who have insisted that voter fraud is nearly nonexistent have fought strenuously to stop Trump’s commission from even studying the issue. The commission has faced seven lawsuits. An eighth suit this week — filed by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice — names the Justice Department and other federal agencies in an effort to uncover information about the commission’s operations.

Churchwell questioned why opponents of the commission are so opposed to its work if they are confident it will produce no evidence of irregularities in the electoral system. He said allegations that the work of the commission and his own organization is racist is laughable — especially since it is minority voters who are most likely to be harmed by noncitizen voting.

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It is difficult to sway a national or statewide election through fraud but much more likely in local elections, Churchwell said. Since immigrants tend to be clustered in areas with high percentages of minority voters, he said, it is those citizens who are most at risk of having their votes diluted by ballots from ineligible voters.

Churchwell pointed to Dallas, where concerns over mail-in ballots threw the results of three city council races into doubt earlier this year.

“Clean voter rolls are kind of like clean water,” he said. “You’ve got to have it.”

(photo credit, homepage images: FOX News / Alice Linahan Voices Empower; article images: FOX News)