Blog 3.1 - Alec Mueller

1. Why did the Trump administration decide to end the Voter Fraud Commission?
The Trump administration determined that backing off was better than the alternative of endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, and it would cost too much money to continue.

2. What claims had Trump made about voter fraud?
Trump claimed on Twitter, without any evidence whatsoever, that “millions” of people voting illegally had cost him the popular vote in the 2016 election.

3. What rate of voter fraud was found by a Loyola Law School study?
Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt studied voter impersonation, the type of fraud that strict voter ID laws (which Trump supports) aim to curtail. Levitt found 35 total credible accusations between 2000 and 2014, constituting a few hundred ballots at most. During this 15-year period, more than 800 million ballots were cast in national general elections and hundreds of millions more were cast in primary, municipal, special, and other elections.

4. What rate of voter fraud did the North Carolina Board of Elections find?
(North Carolina has some of the strictest voter laws in the country)
Another, more recent investigation in North Carolina by the State Board of Elections similarly found just one — out of nearly 4.8 million total votes in 2016 — credible case of in-person voter fraud. That amounts to just 0.00002 percent of all votes.

5. What information does Trump base his claims on?
Trump and his team have cited a 2012 report from the Pew Center on the States as evidence for their claim. But the report didn’t even focus on voter fraud. Instead, it looked the technical aspects of voter registration systems, and how America could save money by upgrading how it registers voters.

6. Why do Republicans continue to emphasize the danger of voter fraud?
They emphasize the danger of voter fraud because it allows them to restrict people's right to vote by tightening voter requirements and eligibility.

7.  How has Attorney General Jeff Sessions changed federal marijuana law enforcement?
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has launched a new war on marijuana legalization. On Thursday, Sessions rescinded guidances from former President Barack Obama’s administration that allowed states to legalize marijuana with minimal federal interference.

8. How did the Obama administration treat this issue?
The Obama administration took a soft approach to the drug, essentially letting states legalize as long as they met certain criteria. But Sessions, who now heads the US Department of Justice, has pulled back the memos at the core of past lax enforcement.

9. What did the "Cole memo" say?
Through a 2013 memo written by then–Deputy Attorney General James Cole (known as the Cole memo), it told the states that as long as they followed some rules (like not letting legal pot fall into kids’ hands or flow across state borders), the feds wouldn’t crack down.

10. What impact could these changes have on states that have legalized marijuana?
This is going to create chaos in the dozens of states whose voters have chosen to regulate medical and adult use marijuana rather than leaving it in the hands of criminals.

11. How can Congress change the impact of this enforcement?
Congress could do something to change this. It could legalize marijuana at the federal level, leaving it to the states to decide what to do about marijuana. Or it could at least limit federal enforcement. This is what Congress did with medical marijuana, passing a budget rider that prohibits the Justice Department from using federal funds to crack down on medical marijuana establishments and users in states where cannabis is legal for such purposes.

12. Why might Sessions's actions provoke a backlash from Republicans?
The risk for Sessions and the Trump administration is their new war on legal marijuana could prompt a backlash.
For one, Sessions’s policy lets federal law enforcement go against the will of the voters. So far, the eight states that have legalized marijuana have done so through ballot initiatives with voter support. The federal government is effectively rejecting those votes by going after legal pot in those states — and voters could take offense to that.

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