Search Results for: "kobach"
…The NYT has this story on Monday’s argument before the Tenth Circuit in Kobach v. EAC and “federal only” rolls in Arizona and Kansas….
Continue reading…Topeka Capital-Journal: The state’s voter identification law and a poll worker who didn’t fully understand it prevented elderly residents of a Topeka care facility from voting in Tuesday’s primary election. Secretary of State Kris Kobach confirmed Thursday that some residents of Brewster Place in southwest Topeka who showed up to a polling place there without I.D.s were turned away without being issued provisional ballots, as required by law….
Continue reading…w, assuming we get all four commissioners on board, is what happens to the Kobach v. EAC litigation over whether Kansas and Arizona must accept voters who register with the EAC-approved federal form but do not provide documentary proof of citizenship as the states require. The EAC is pushing forward with its appeal (the states won in the lower court), but what happens if the four new commissioners deadlock on moving forward? As Doug Chapin likes t…
Continue reading…AP: “A Shawnee County judge cleared the way Friday for Kansas to use a dual voting system to help enforce its proof-of-citizenship rule for new voters, suggesting that doing otherwise could taint the state’s August primary election.” Via Richard Winger….
Continue reading…Belenky v. Kobach: The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Kansas filed a lawsuit challenging Kansas’ two-tiered voter registration system. The complaint charges that eligible voters are being divided into separate and unequal classes, in violation of the Kansas Constitution’s equal protection guarantees. [This post has been corrected to indicate that the ACLU was asking today for a preliminary injunction.]…
Continue reading…p election officer. Scott Morgan, a Republican challenger, and Jean Schodorf, the Democratic candidate, both accuse incumbent Kris Kobach of disenfranchising voters. …
Continue readingIn this brief order, the 10th Circuit has stayed the district court’s order requiring the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to modify its federal voter registration form to require documentary proof of citizenship for AZ and KS residents. The appellate court did not go into details as to the reasons for the stay, beyond noting that the government and intervenors (who oppose requiring the federal form to include a demand for this information) “m…
Continue reading…bed Interstate Crosscheck run by Republican Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. As of 2013, 28 states sent voter information to Kansas where the record of each of their voters is run against the records in all the other participating states. They are matched on first name, last name, date of birth and Social Security number. Interstate Crosscheck’s own guide for states includes an important caveat that tends to get overlooked: “a significant nu…
Continue reading…osted an item on my Election Law Blog about Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach pushing for new literacy tests for voting. The date of the blog post was April 1, and the link to the story went to Google’s gag for April Fools’ Day. Many readers – including some quite sophisticated lawyers and journalists – took the bait. It isn’t funny, but the best April Fools’ jokes are the ones that come closest to the truth. Americans, in the John Roberts era…
Continue reading…, get to set “voter qualifications” for voting even in federal elections,” Kobach, a Republican elected official, explained. “That was the basis for the recent ruling requiring the federal government to include Kansas’s demand for citizenship information on voter registration cards. This is simply the next step to assure fairness and uniformity in election administration. Also, if you can’t write in English, you don’t deserve a vote.” A leading ci…
Continue reading…voters registering using the federal form. Worse, the precedent set by the Kobach case could give states greater power to restrict registration and voting under the guise of enforcing “voter qualifications.” Freed of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina enacted the toughest set of voting restrictions in a single measure I can think of since at least the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Texas is aggressively enforcing its tough…
Continue readingDoug: As usual, what’s most interesting (at least to me) is what’s next. Here’s a short list: Does the EAC appeal in an effort to revive its authority to control the federal form and the accompanying instructions – and if so, do they prevail? Does the appeal make its way back to the Supreme Court and give Justices another opportunity to delineate federal and state election law responsibilities as they did in last summer’s opinion in Arizona v. In…
Continue readingToday a federal court decided Kobach v. United States Election Assistance Commission.The upshot of this opinion, if it stands on appeal, is that states with Republican legislatures and/or Republican chief election officials are likely to require documentary proof of citizenship for voting, making it harder for Democrats to pursue a relatively simple method of voter registration. The case is complicated and has a complex history, but here are the…
Continue reading…Case continues over EAC’s authority under the NVRA against the states. While Kobach said the EAC did not have the authority to reject state requested information for the federal form, he added that a court would strike down the anti-Swedish voting law as unconstitutional….
Continue reading…Demos NAACP Brennan Center LWV So far, I don’t see any statement from True the Vote, Todd Rokita, Kris Kobach, or others who might criticize report from the right. I will update with more statements when I get them. UPDATE: Jon Husted….
Continue reading…, but it is not the typical line of hard line Republicans like KS SOS Kris Kobach. 5. Whither the EAC? One of my main criticisms of the PCEA concept from the beginning is that we already have a standing federal agency which is supposed to be doing, on an ongoing basis, what the PCEA is doing as a six-month temporary commitee: the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Republicans and state election officials want it shut down, and it has no confirme…
Continue reading…te senator filed a motion today in federal court in Kansas to intervene in Kobach v. U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), to oppose a renewed effort by the States of Arizona and Kansas (and their Secretaries of State) to impose these States’ proof-of-citizenship laws on persons applying to register to vote using the federal mail-in registration form. The federal form was created by Congress as part of the National Voter Registration Act of 1…
Continue reading…on & Legal Defense Fund, Inc., in Support of Petitioners Brief for Kris W. Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State in Support of Petitioners Brief for Landmark Legal Foundation in Support of Petitioners Brief for Members of Congress in Support of Petitioners Brief for Mountain States Legal Foundation in Support of Petitioners Brief for State Senator Russell Pearce in Support of Petitioners Brief for Community Voter Registration Organizations in Support…
Continue reading…ry that weren’t counted because the voters didn’t present the proper photo identification under the new voter ID law. They probably weren’t trying to commit voter impersonation fraud, sources, including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, say. Nor is it likely they were disenfranchised, the same sources say. Whether others who didn’t bother to go to the polls because of the hurdles created by the law were disenfranchised by it remains a source…
Continue reading…he state’s new voter photo identification law, but Secretary of State Kris Kobach is confident the law will hold up in court. The need to pay for some underlying documents in order to obtain a free ID appears to be a key issue, although the Kansas Voter Coalition wouldn’t talk about specific legal strategies. More than a half-dozen groups, including the Kansas chapters of the League of Women Voters and American Civil Liberties Union, make up the c…
Continue reading…News from Kansas: “An election law written by Secretary of State Kris Kobach that requires photo identification to vote and other restrictions is raising new concerns about absentee voting.”…
Continue reading…SOS Kobach hit with fines for campaign finance reporting violations and lack of candor with Kansas ethics commission. Kobach has been an outspoken supporter of voter identification laws to prevent a virtually non-existent type of voter fraud….
Continue reading…fraud. I pointed out that impersonation fraud rarely if ever happens, and Kobach confirmed he’s got no cases of impersonation fraud he can point to in Kansas. But Kobach also said that a state id requirement would be necessary to prevent a different type of crime: the use of false registrations (of fictitious people) to cast votes in elections. He gave the example of someone registering and voting ballots for the fictitious seven dwarfs. I pointe…
Continue reading…We hear what’s happening in state capitols all over the country. Do both parties try to use election laws to their own advantage? Guests: Ari Berman: The Nation magazine Kris Kobach: Kansas Secretary of State Rick Hasen: University of California, Irvine Patrick Marley: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel …
Continue reading…Michael Waldman, responding to Kris Kobach’s earlier op-ed. And for those who still don’t believe the numbers, there’s a timely story about two physicians in South Carolina trying mightily to help patients who don’t have ID get ID….
Continue reading…Kansas SOS Kris Kobach has written this oped for the WSJ. I expect at some point I’ll be linking to a rebuttal of some of Mr. Kobach’s empirical claims in this piece….
Continue reading…This report begins: “The Federal Elections Commission is convinced the Kansas Republican Party violated campaign finance law while Secretary of State Kris Kobach led the statewide political organization, officials said Friday.”…
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