Never mind your data, Kobach wants the midterms

Trump’s “election integrity” commission could help Republicans keep control of Congress.

Rob Dennis
Jul 22, 2017 · 5 min read
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

Imaginary fraudulent voters better watch out: Kris Kobach is on the case.

Kobach is the vice chair of a 15-member commission set up by President Donald Trump “to promote fair and honest federal elections” or, to put it more accurately, to justify Trump’s preposterous claim that 3 million to 5 million illegal ballots cost him the popular vote in last year’s presidential election.

“We will probably never know the answer to that question,” Kobach said Wednesday when asked whether Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

Well, actually we already know the answer to that question: Clinton won the popular vote. Voter fraud played no role in that, because voter fraud doesn’t exist in any meaningful way.

Numerous studies have shown voter fraud to be exceedingly rare — by one reckoning, only 31 incidents out of more than a billion ballots cast nationwide.

I spent a few months looking into this more than a decade ago in California. I found plenty of dead people still on the voting rolls. I found people who were registered in more than one place. I even found God, in the form of a voter who’d legally changed his name and registered as the deity.

What I didn’t find was widespread voter fraud, because — at the risk of repeating myself — it doesn’t exist.

Still, no actual proof of fraud is required; a juicy headline for right-wing media to shore up Trump’s base will suffice. And Kobach is the guy to deliver it.

Kobach, who helped craft a controversial anti-immigration law in Arizona, made “fighting voter fraud” the key issue in his campaign for Kansas secretary of state in 2010 by pushing unsubstantiated and outright false claims. For instance, he claimed there were 1,966 dead people registered to vote, some of whom actually had cast ballots. He named only one: Alfred K. Brewer.

Brewer, it turned out, was alive, doing yard work, and very much surprised to receive news of his demise.

“I don’t think this is heaven,” he told a Wichita Eagle reporter. “Not when I’m raking leaves.”

Still, Kobach’s scaremongering had the desired effect and he was duly elected. He successfully pushed for a law requiring proof of citizenship from voter registration applicants, and then asked legislators to expand his powers to allow him to prosecute voter fraud. They obliged in 2015.

Armed with this newly won authority, Kobach threw himself into the task with vigor and convicted … eight people. Out of nearly 1.8 million registered voters in Kansas.

Kobach’s feeble efforts won him the support of Trump, newly elected and in need of a scapegoat for his popular-vote loss.

This is not, however, merely about stroking the ego of the emotional toddler in the White House. Kobach has a more sinister agenda. If his efforts are successful, he could help Republicans maintain control of Congress next year and even see Trump re-elected in 2020.

It started the day after Trump was elected, when Kobach told the transition team about the possibility of changing federal law to require proof of citizenship during voter registration, according to an email obtained by the ACLU as part of an ongoing lawsuit.

Kobach is familiar with these tactics, having used them to try to block 18,000 “motor voter” applicants in Kansas, until a federal judge slapped him down. Kobach also was behind the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a system used by election officials in 28 states to compile lists of people who could be registered in more than one state.

Rolling Stone looked into some of the lists and found that a quarter of the names lacked a middle-name match, and that the system ignored designations of Jr. and Sr.

Database expert Mark Swedlund denounced Crosscheck’s methodology as “childish.”

“God forbid your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the U.S., and your first name is Joseph or Jose,” Swedlund told Rolling Stone. “You’re probably suspected of voting in 27 states.”

That, of course, is the whole point.

The myth of voter fraud is used by Kobach and his ilk to justify an actual threat to democracy: voter suppression. For decades, under the guise of “election security,” Republican-controlled states have been passing Voter ID laws, purging registered voters, restricting registration, and using other tactics that help disenfranchise black and Latino voters, among others.

Unlike voter fraud, these tactics could actually swing elections.

Take Florida. Before the 2000 presidential election, the state hired a private firm to purge more than 82,000 “felons” from the voting rolls. Depending on your level of cynicism, the purge was either a disaster or it achieved precisely the desired outcome.

It turns out, 12,000 voters who weren’t felons were removed from the rolls. Blacks, who make up 11 percent of the Florida electorate, made up 44 percent of the purge list. Ninety percent of black voters cast ballots for Vice President Al Gore.

George W. Bush won Florida and the presidency by 537 votes.

As Ari Berman noted in the Nation, “It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election.”

Republicans have ramped up their politically motivated voter suppression efforts in the years since, and 14 states had new voting restrictions in place for last year’s presidential election.

It’s not difficult to see how Kobach could use the commission to support those efforts. For starters, he plans to compare voter databases with a federal database of green-card holders to see if non-citizens are registered.

Florida already tried this a few years back, using driver’s license data. It didn’t go well. The state initially identified 182,000 suspected non-citizens. That list eventually shrank to 198.

In addition to hunting down registered non-citizens, Kobach could look for and find dead people who remain on the voting rolls. A 2012 study found 1.8 million of those. (Kobach might not bother with dead people, who can’t be disenfranchised.)

He also could expand Crosscheck nationwide to find people (Tiffany Trump and Steve Bannon, for instance) who are registered in more than one state. The 2012 study found 2.75 million of those.

Based on the results, Kobach likely will seek a nationwide purge of our voter rolls. At a minimum, he will publicly conflate flawed voter records with voter fraud, and Fox News and Breitbart will take it from there. The commission’s “findings” then can be used as the basis for even more restrictive voting laws.

There are actual problems that affect the integrity of our elections: gerrymandering, the role of money in campaigns, and the aforementioned disenfranchisement, to name a few.

A sobering stat: An estimated 51 million eligible voters remain unregistered.

Kobach isn’t trying to solve that problem. He’s trying to make it worse.

Read the latest news at Lobby99.

News in FiVe

Understand what's important … in five minutes a day.

Rob Dennis

Written by

Reporter and documentary filmmaker. News in FiVe news director.

News in FiVe

Understand what's important … in five minutes a day.

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