Sketchy Reporting of Zachary Roth at MSNBC

Those who call themselves reporters are supposed to report facts, not present half truths. MSNBC apparently has different standards for the people they call reporters.

Take Zachary Roth. Yesterday, PJ Media reported on the settlement between the state of Ohio and True the Vote and Judicial Watch in case seeking to have clean voting rolls in Ohio. At MSNBC, Roth objected to the agreement doing what federal law allows: mailing notices to inactive voters to attempt to discover whether they still live where they once did and if they want to reactivate their registration. It isn’t surprising that Roth would object to list maintenance best practices.

Roth

Nor is it surprising that Roth would give readers a false impression about the interstate cross check program included in the settlement. Interstate cross check is a pact between a number of states to compare voter rolls to see if people are registered in multiple states. Roth paints this practice as a nefarious partisan program managed by Republicans.  Roth writes:

 

In the deal announced Monday, Ohio agreed to participate in the Interstate Voter Registration Cross-Check program, known as Cross-Check, run by Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, which aims to identify voters registered in more than one state. Ohio had been sued in federal court by two conservative groups—True the Vote, the Tea Party-linked group that stokes concern over voter fraud, and Judicial Watch—seeking to force the state to clean up its voter rolls. . . .
But voting-rights advocates say Cross-Check makes it too easy to wrongly remove voters from the rolls. Speaking to msnbc last month, Keesha Gaskins, at the time a senior counsel at the Brennan Center, called Kobach’s program “more of a purge mechanism.”

Unfortunately for Roth, the cross state program was as plan hatched by Republicans and Democrats. An election official emails PJ Media:

The Kansas project was started by a bipartisan group of 4 secretaries of state in that region, including a Republican and Democrat Secretary of State. The Democrat SOS was Robin Callahan, very much a liberal. The Republican SOS in Kansas was Ron Thornburg. When Kobach walked in, it already existed.

Roth leaves out these inconvenient bipartisan facts because it would impair his effort to stoke paranoia among MSNBC viewers.

Gaskins

Notice also the extremism of the Brennan Center’s Keesha Gaskins. The Brennan Center is notorious for objecting to every single smart election integrity proposal. Whether Voter ID or citizenship verification, the Brennan Center can be counted on to keep vulnerabilities in our electoral system wide open. They don’t support a single measure to improve the integrity of American elections.  And when you have “reporters” in the media willing to play along, why change?