American Civil Liberties Union attorneys on Thursday scrutinized examples of questionable voters compiled by the Sedgwick County elections commissioner and reported to Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Of the 38 people in Tabitha Lehman’s spreadsheet, only five were noncitizens who tried to vote, Lehman said.
During the third day of a trial that challenges Kobach to prove his claims of widespread voter fraud, the ACLU questioned Lehman about people who were mistakenly given registration forms after admitting they weren’t citizens and compared the dozen illegal votes by five noncitizens to the 1.3 million ballots casts in her county while she compiled her list.
The spreadsheet contains three types of individuals: 18 noncitizens who successfully registered to vote, 16 who tried to register, and four who were blocked until an appeals court halted enforcement of the state’s proof of citizenship law. Those four became citizens before voting….
In a recurring theme for this trial, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson repeatedly refused to allow Kobach and his team to introduce new evidence during Thursday’s testimony.
After a failed attempt to question Caskey about the latest number of suspended voters in the state database, Kobach and Robinson engaged in a fiery discussion about Kobach’s failure to provide updated figures for two years before trying to submit new numbers on the night before the trial began. If updated numbers were important, she said, he could have followed the rules.
“You’re not going to introduce new evidence through witnesses here,” Robinson said. “That’s not fair. That’s surprise. That’s ambush.”
Sue Becker, Kobach’s chief legal counsel, shouted over Robinson with an allegation the ACLU team had been dishonest earlier in the week. Robinson told Becker she was out of line and admonished her for confusing the record.
Earlier in the day, the ACLU pointed out Lehman failed to follow the court’s order that witnesses not listen to any other testimony or read news stories about the trial. Lehman admitted she had done both.