“Kris Kobach’s Spectacular Voter-Fraud Failure Is on Trial”

Sharp Frank Wilkinson for Bloomberg View:

When Kobach ran for office in 2010, he condemned the thousands of dead people and illegal aliens who were poisoning his state’s ballot box with their fraudulent votes. But in his seven years as secretary of state, with powerful tools to investigate voter fraud, Kobach hasn’t done much to stem the invisible tide of zombie voters. He has filedcharges against only 15 people since gaining prosecutorial power in 2015. Many of those charged, including Republicans, seemed more confused than menacing.

Kobach told the federal court this week that Kansas’s voter-registration law had prevented between 1,000 and 18,000 non-citizens from voting. That factor of 18 in the estimate does seem curiously large, doesn’t it? But Kobach quantifies voter fraud with the kind of attention to detail that Joe McCarthy once applied to counting communists in the State Department…..

An ACLU attorney responded that of the 127 improper registration cases since 2000, 43 people appeared to have registered successfully and only 11 appeared to have actually voted, most through clerical errors or confusion. So the tally is 11 voters over 18 years in a state with 1.8 million registered voters.

Kobach surely knows that a lack of evidence – 127, 129, whatever — won’t undermine his good standing with the likes of “Jim from Iowa.” Because their joint cause runs on resentment and racial paranoia, not facts or evidence.

“The 129 is just the tip of the iceberg,” Kobach said. “We know the iceberg is much larger.” Yes, much larger. Huge, even. In his eighth year in office, Kobach’s getting ready to buckle down, roll up his sleeves and get to work finding that iceberg. Just as soon as he gets back to work.

 

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