Jeffrey Toobin: “Stein’s demands for a recount reflect the same narcissism as her candidacy, whose primary function was to help Trump win. (Her roughly one per cent of the national vote included more than enough votes to swing two of the three states to Clinton.) Now she has exploited legitimate questions about interference by Russia, which, it seems, organized or backed a hacking operation that involved the theft of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. This drew a curiously passive response from the Obama Administration, but there remains no evidence that Russia or any other outside force systematically intervened or altered the result in any state. The recounts will only give Trump an opportunity to claim victory again.”
“More important, they have turned attention away from the real voting-rights scandal of 2016. This was the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court’s notorious Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. Several Republican-controlled states took the Court’s decision as an invitation to rewrite their election laws, purportedly to address the (nonexistent) problem of voter fraud but in fact to limit the opportunities for Democrats and minorities (overlapping groups, of course) to cast their ballots.”
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