So far, John Gale, Nebraska's lame duck Secretary of State, Nebraska's Attorney General, Doug Peterson and Gale's would-be successor, Bob Evnen, all Republicans, have been uniformly mute on the fact that Kris Kobach, the
principal architect of voter suppression in the USA, apparently broke federal law in requesting details on every Nebraska registered voter (the same kind of data Russia tried to hack last year) on behalf of Donald Trump's so-called
"Voter Integrity Commission" chaired by Mike Pence and run by Kobach.
From
The Hill:
Under the Paperwork Reduction Act, information requests from agencies
and other federal entities are supposed to first be submitted to the
Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory
Affairs (OIRA).
This 1980 law requires federal agencies to seek
public input, including through a comment period, before a request for
information. A 1995 amendment extended OIRA’s authority to include not
only requests for information for the government, but also requests for
information to the public.
The law also requires that agencies
justify their requests for public information, specify how it will be
used and provide assurances that data will be protected. The law also
obliges the agencies to estimate how many hours it will take entities to
respond.
It does not appear that the commission submitted its
request to OIRA before sending a letter to states asking for voter
information.
Experts say the failure to do so would be
significant, since states would be under no obligation to respond to
requests that violate federal law.
“If the commission gets
heavy-handed with them, it seems to me that the states are within their
right to say, 'No, we don’t have to respond because you didn’t go
through [OIRA],'” said Susan Dudley, a former OIRA administrator who is
now director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington
University.
The commission did not immediately respond to questions about whether it had submitted its request through OIRA.
And that's not all. Yesterday,
according to CNN, "The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law called on the Justice
Department to investigate whether Kobach violated the Hatch Act, a 1939
law intended to keep federal employees from directly supporting
candidates, accusing him of using his role on the presidential
commission to promote his campaign and solicit contributions."
Kobach's voter supression machinations have resulted in four ACLU lawsuits, so far, and he has lost every one.
 |
Blind, deaf and mute on vote suppression masquerading as "ballot integrity": GOP Secretary of State
candidate Bob Evnen, GOP Secretary of State John Gale and Attorney General Doug Peterson |
The Washington Post has reported that "
Kobach was fined $1,000 on Friday by a federal magistrate judge for
“patently misleading representations” he made to the court about the
contents of a document he was photographed taking into a November
meeting with then President-elect Donald Trump."
Six Nebraska state senators have written a letter to John Gale requesting that he reject the "request." They are Sens. Kate Bolz, Adam Morfeld, Matt Hansen and Anna Wishart of Lincoln; and Sens. Sara Howard and John McCollister of Omaha.
Even though the Secretaries of State of 45 states have weighed in on Trump, Nebraska's GOP Secretary of State (John Gale) has said, nothing, the GOP candidate running to replace him (Bob Evnen) has been mute, and Nebraska's GOP Attorney General (Doug Peterson) is similarly paralyzed.
Tweets about this issue have accused the office of Nebraska's Secretary of State of demanding names and phone numbers of callers before addressing (or, more specifically, not answering) their questions. We called, and found this to be true.
