MT. OLYMPUS (The Borowitz Report)—Partially confirming Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s theory of divine intervention in the 2016 election, Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos, discord, and strife, revealed on Friday that she had wanted Donald J. Trump to be President.
Speaking from her temple on Mt. Olympus, the usually reclusive deity said that Trump was “far and away” her first choice to be President in 2016.
“I’d been following his career for years,” the goddess of disorder and ruin said. “The bankruptcies, the business failures. There was a lot for me to love.”
Straight-up racism. That’s the modern GOP in power:
The situation in Texas is a mess. But it is a dangerous mess. Paxton, a notorious foe of voting rights, is creating chaos and confusion in order to justify a radical purge of Texas’ voter rolls. As three new lawsuits filed by an array of civil rights groups argue, this purge isn’t just slapdash and sloppy—it’s discriminatory and illegal. Paxton and his allies are taking a page from Kris Kobach’s playbook of shock and awe: Toss out a wildly inflated claim of non-citizen voting, then use the ensuing panic to justify mass disenfranchisement. It is a dirty and duplicitous tactic. And thanks to America’s increasingly conservative judiciary, it might actually succeed.
Texas’ voter fraud pandemonium is actually a combination of Kobach’s two favorite moves: creating dubious lists of allegedly fraudulent voters to disenfranchise, and forcing people to prove citizenship in order to cast a ballot. Whitley’s purge list was created using a profoundly flawed method: His office identified individuals who presented documents indicating that they were not citizens when obtaining or renewing driver’s licenses, using Department of Public Safety records dating back to 1996. It then cross-referenced this list with voter rolls to come up with the numbers Paxton quoted—95,000 aliens registered to vote, 58,000 of whom have cast a ballot.
This methodology has a massive flaw: More than 50,000 Texas residents are naturalized each year, and when they become citizens, they are not obligated to inform the Department of Public Safety. It is therefore extremely likely that many if not all of the individuals whom Whitley flagged have become U.S. citizens and are perfectly lawful Texas voters.
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