Letter: Election stolen by illegitimate president and GOP cronies

Interstate Crosscheck is a product of Kris Kovach, secretary of state in Kansas and a campaign adviser of Donald Trump. It was just supposed to prevent people from voting twice. But what it really did was throw out thousands and thousands of valid minority and Democratic votes in swing states.

For example, if your name was Michael David Brown in Michigan and Michael Rasheed Brown in Pennsylvania, or your name was Maria Christina Hernández in Michigan and Maria Esperanza Hernández in Wisconsin, your votes were thrown out as the same vote. These votes were overwhelmingly from people of color.

In Michigan alone, 449,922 votes were thrown out as being double votes. Other swing states had similar outcomes. The system was set up to read first, middle, and last names, but Republican-controlled states chose not to use middle names, making this a Jim Crow program sponsored by the Koch brothers.

Trump sued to stop the recount; Paul Ryan said they were given a mandate to undo Obama’s programs. There was no mandate, if all the legal votes were allowed to be counted in the Electoral College. It was a just a stolen election by an illegitimate president and his Republican cronies.

This story was originally published January 15, 2017 at 4:16 AM with the headline "Letter: Election stolen by illegitimate president and GOP cronies."