Philip Bump:
Kobach is the co-chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, alongside the vice president of the United States. He is running a federal investigation into the integrity of the voting system — and he cites college kids at Dartmouth as “proof” that Hillary Clinton actually lost the state. His commission, in fact, could ask New Hampshire for the data to investigate these 5,000 cases itself, at which point Kobach could inform the public about whether or not fraud had been proven. Instead he riffed on a Washington Times article.
This isn’t a game. Trump’s commission seems clearly designed to present fraud as a significant threat to the electoral system, a claim that’s belied by any number of studies, including one looking specifically at New Hampshire, and the lack of nearly any actual uncovered examples of it. (If millions voted illegally in California, as some have claimed, you’d have thought maybe one would have been caught.) The effect of the commission will invariably be to call for new legislation making it harder to vote. Such a law in Kansas meant that 34,000 fewer people voted in that state in 2012 than in 2008, with those affected skewing younger and less white. Read: More Democratic.
Kobach’s past behavior and other recent comments have suggested he’s inappropriate for his Trump-appointed role; this Breitbart essay makes that more clear. Incidentally, it was revealed recently that Kobach is compensated for his work at the conservative site. As a paid columnist, the logical leaps of that piece are questionable, much less as one of the two guys running an ostensibly objective look at if there is fraud in the system.