1. The White House said that “many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry.” So the White House backed off, arguing that it was better than the alternative of “endless legal battles at taxpayer expense.”
2. Trump similarly claimed on Twitter, without any evidence whatsoever, that “millions” of people voting illegally had cost him the popular vote in the 2016 election.
3. 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.
4. 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. Trump and his team, in his defense, 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. Many Republicans and conservative media outlets like Fox News promoted fears that ACORN, a community organization that focused in part on registering African-American voters, was engaging in mass-scale election fraud.
7. Sessions said that the move will allow federal prosecutors “to use previously established prosecutorial principles that provide them all the necessary tools to disrupt criminal organizations, tackle the growing drug crisis, and thwart violent crime across our country.”
8. The Obama administration took a soft approach to the drug, essentially letting states legalize as long as they met certain criteria.
9. 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. This let states carry out their legalization schemes with little federal interference — although federal law does still make it so legal pot businesses can’t claim certain tax deductions and easily access banking.
10. “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,” Neill Franklin, executive director of the pro-legalization Law Enforcement Action Partnership, said in a statement. “If enforcement of laws are subject to the whims of individual prosecutors, no one will have any idea what is legal or what isn’t — because it could change from day to day.
11. Sessions’s policy lets federal law enforcement go against the will of the voters.
12. Gallup even found that a majority of Republicans now support legalization. (One caveat: Anti-legalization advocates argue that if surveys offered options between decriminalization, medical legalization, and recreational legalization, voters would be much less likely to say that they back full legalization.)
2. Trump similarly claimed on Twitter, without any evidence whatsoever, that “millions” of people voting illegally had cost him the popular vote in the 2016 election.
3. 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.
4. 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. Trump and his team, in his defense, 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. Many Republicans and conservative media outlets like Fox News promoted fears that ACORN, a community organization that focused in part on registering African-American voters, was engaging in mass-scale election fraud.
7. Sessions said that the move will allow federal prosecutors “to use previously established prosecutorial principles that provide them all the necessary tools to disrupt criminal organizations, tackle the growing drug crisis, and thwart violent crime across our country.”
8. The Obama administration took a soft approach to the drug, essentially letting states legalize as long as they met certain criteria.
9. 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. This let states carry out their legalization schemes with little federal interference — although federal law does still make it so legal pot businesses can’t claim certain tax deductions and easily access banking.
10. “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,” Neill Franklin, executive director of the pro-legalization Law Enforcement Action Partnership, said in a statement. “If enforcement of laws are subject to the whims of individual prosecutors, no one will have any idea what is legal or what isn’t — because it could change from day to day.
11. Sessions’s policy lets federal law enforcement go against the will of the voters.
12. Gallup even found that a majority of Republicans now support legalization. (One caveat: Anti-legalization advocates argue that if surveys offered options between decriminalization, medical legalization, and recreational legalization, voters would be much less likely to say that they back full legalization.)
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