Editorial roundup

July 4

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Commission on Election Integrity

Last week Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, managed the rare feat of bringing officials of both political parties together. In his capacity as vice chairman of President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Kobach sent a letter to election officials in all 50 states asking for copies of their voter data. This has all the signs of a badly disguised, new effort to suppress votes of likely Democrats.

At last count, officials in 29 states had either rejected Kobach’s request outright or promised not to send him all the information he requested. “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” said Delbert Hosemann, Mississippi’s Republican secretary of state.

Among the states that won’t be fully complying: Kansas. Kobach’s own office said state law prevents him from releasing everything he asked for: “the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of Social Security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, canceled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information.”

On the other hand, there’s Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican whose initial response to Kobach’s letter was that he’d be happy to comply. Upon further review, Ashcroft’s office said it would be supplying only data that’s available to the general public through open records requests. That’s basically just names, addresses, dates of birth and voting participation. Political candidates use such data to target frequent voters or those who vote in specific party primaries.

Kobach’s voter integrity commission, co-chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, is based on Trump’s absurd claim that rampant fraud by illegal immigrants cost him the popular vote on Nov. 8. Independent studies have shown that voter impersonation is so rare as to be nonexistent. Kobach himself has convicted only one non-citizen who voted in Kansas.

But Americans often move from state to state and may be registered in two states; it doesn’t mean they vote in both. Millions of people with similar names risk being disqualified if Kobach, a leading proponent of the vote-fraud myth, succeeds.

In Kansas, Kobach’s voter suppression effort led to 35,000 people — most of them young people who tend to vote Democratic — being denied registration because they didn’t have a birth certificate or passport with them. A study found 1 percent of them were non-citizens. To think that he doesn’t have bigger plans is to ignore his history of politically motivated voter suppression.

The Constitution gives states the right to manage elections. American democracy doesn’t need Kris Kobach’s help.

June 30

The Denver Post

Health care protesters

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner should have left protesters in his office Thursday until he got into town that night — regardless of the time his airplane’s wheels touched down — and met with them to discuss their fears that Republican cuts to Medicaid would also cut off life-supporting services.

Instead, the first-term Republican’s staff had the disabled protesters arrested and physically removed from his downtown Denver office Thursday night as he was headed into town for the congressional break.

The arrests were hard to watch.

We are ashamed. This is a man who we have stood up for when he didn’t hold town hall meetings. We’ve given him the benefit of the doubt that he would fight for a better version of the Republican repeal of Obamacare, using his vote as leverage for a more moderate bill.

Our disappointment is tempered only by assurances that for two days Gardner’s local staff members slept in the office with protesters — a move that allowed the protesters to stay and ensured they would have access to bathrooms and other care. Gardner’s staffers were facing pressure from the building owners and other tenants. Gardner’s downtown office lobby space is small, and nine overnight protesters inconvenienced others in the building. Gardner met with members of ADAPT — a Colorado-born group fighting for disability rights — once this year. His staff members have met or held phone calls with ADAPT members another 15 times in the last year.

We don’t condone the behavior of the protesters. There’s a more effective way to get things done, even in politics today, than breaking laws and getting arrested.

That said, we agree with the message of the protest.

The Republican bill has been silent — by design — on how $772 billion would impact Medicaid patients over the next 10 years. The disabled community has valid reason to fear. As Denver Post reporters Danika Worthington and Mark Matthews reported, the disabled make up 7 percent of Medicaid participants in Colorado but account for 27 percent of the program’s costs. Republicans in Congress are trying to cut Medicaid funding without reform or specification of what should be cut. “Let states figure it out” has been the mantra.

No doubt, Gardner faced a tough situation, and its complications were multiplied, his spokesman, Alex Siciliano tells us, by the fact the senator’s plane back to Denver International Airport was diverted and didn’t land until around midnight.

But surely a senator facing such a scene back in Denver could have demanded that he be allowed to meet with the protesters and try to defuse the situation.

The GOP created the uncertainty for vulnerable populations that in part drove ADAPT protests across the country to step up their opposition. In Rochester, N.Y., 25 people were arrested. Gardner shares in that responsibility.

The senator should have been a leader and tried to use his skills as a politician to convince ADAPT that their concerns were valid and had been heard, but that now it was time to leave for health and safety reasons. After that, police intervention could have been warranted.