…eral form. There is also litigation over the “dual” voting system that SOS Kobach has put in place over the objections of voting rights activists. There’s another one of these Kansas cases pending before the 10th Circuit. And there is a state court case about Kobah’s dual voting system. [If you want details on any of these cases, use the search box on ELB or check out the Major Pending Election Cases at the indispensable Election Law @ Moritz webs…
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…ls heard arguments in the case Tuesday from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and the American Civil Liberties Union but didn’t indicate how soon they could rule. Kansas wants the court to overturn a ruling by a federal judge in May that temporarily blocked the state from disenfranchising people who registered at motor vehicle offices but didn’t provide documents such as birth certificates or naturalization papers. That was about 18,000 people…
Continue reading…Here. Update: I gave a listen. This was a very active panel which questioned both sides. But it does seem that Kobach got a harder time from the judges….
Continue reading…ssue of whether an EAC bureaucrat exceeded his authority when he allowed Kansas and Arizona to require documentary proof of citizenship for voters who register to vote in federal elections using the federal form. There is also litigation over the “dual” voting system that SOS Kobach has put in place over the objections of voting rights activists. [Update: There’s another one of these Kansas cases pending before the 10th Circuit.] [If you want deta…
Continue reading…the Republican National Lawyers Association convention in Colorado, where he urged his fellow election officials and lawyers to adopt legislation modeled after a law he helped push through in Kansas….
Continue reading…hese voters vote under the federal “motor-voter” law. The rule, crafted by Kobach’s office, still bars more than 17,000 motor-voters from participating in state and local elections without providing proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport. The American Civil Liberties Union, which prevailed against Kobach in federal court earlier this year, is challenging the new rule in state court in an attempt to enable these voters to vot…
Continue reading…House wants to convene a grand jury to investigate Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Steven X. Davis, a Democratic candidate for the Kansas House from Lawrence, filed a petition with the Douglas Country District Court to summon a grand jury to investigate whether the secretary of state’s office committed election fraud in 2014. Davis, who is challenging incumbent Rep. Barbara Ballard, D-Lawrence, in House District 44, said the secretary of state’s o…
Continue reading…ct. Shawnee County District Judge Franklin Theis last monthreiterated that Kobach cannot stop Kansans from voting in state and local elections simply because they registered to vote using federal forms that don’t require the same onerous documentation that Kobach prefers. The dual system would allow some Kansans to vote for federal offices, like U.S. senator and U.S. representative, but not for their state representative, state senator, or other s…
Continue reading…sing ID requirements to suppress voters who tend toward the Democrats. Mr. Kobach is pushing the myth that voter cheating is rampant. But he has utterly failed to document that, despite his Javert-like zealotry as secretary of state. In fact, the federal ruling against him said there was evidence of only three instances across 18 years in which noncitizens voted in Kansas. While the courts are at it, I wonder if there will be sanctions for Kobach…
Continue reading…e Rules and Regulations Board voted 4-0 to approve Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s proposal to allow 17,000 Kansans to vote in federal – but not state and local – elections this year. The policy was approved before the public had an opportunity to comment and only a few minutes after the secretary of state’s office had posted it online…. Critics say the policy sets up a tiered voting system – which was already ruled unconstitutional by a Kansas d…
Continue reading…sas residents or have little connection to official duties. On some trips, Kobach scheduled state business to coincide with Republican Party functions, and his family often flew with him…. Kobach defended his use of the plane by saying that he’s doing it less than former Republican Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh, who also flew with family members and logged about 8,700 miles over two years. He added that filling empty seats doesn’t increase the…
Continue readingAP: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is planning to use provisional ballots during the upcoming elections and then throw out all of the votes for state and local races cast by the thousands of voters who register to vote at motor vehicle offices without providing proof of citizenship. An email sent from Kobach’s office to county election officials outlines the state’s proposed plans for implementing a two-tiered election system in the wake o…
Continue reading…vernor should stop taking legal advice from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and start taking some responsibility for the chaos created by the law requiring people prove U.S. citizenship to register to vote. As it is, the burden of guaranteeing at least partial voting rights in Kansas is falling on judges – most recently the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ refusal last week to temporarily block a May order by U.S. District Judge Julie Ro…
Continue reading…e KC Star: What does Kobach have to say about all this? As MSNBC reported, Kobach and his office refused to say what his plans were during the day Tuesday. That’s odd for a guy who’s usually a publicity hound. Now that he has been unable to find more than a handful of people who voted illegally in the last few years, and other voter fraud charges have blown up in his face, he has gone silent. Kobach needs to get out of the way. Let county elected…
Continue reading…before early voting begins for its primary. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office issued instructions to county election officials late Tuesday to register those motor voter applicants without citizenship documentation to vote — but only in the federal races for President and U.S. Senate and U.S. House. Those guidelines come in the wake of a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decision last week that refused to temporarily block a federal judge…
Continue reading…eswoman didn’t respond to multiple phone and email messages asking whether Kobach intends to begin registering voters. Messages sent on Twitter to Kobach and to the official account for the secretary of state’s office also went unanswered. “Secretary Kobach has repeatedly stood in the way of thousands of Kansans who have tried to exercise their right to vote,” Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s voting rights project, said in a statement Tuesday.“…
Continue reading…ound to be almost nonexistent in America. Since the law took effect July 1, 2015, the publicity-seeking Kobach had filed a puny half-dozen cases by early May. One case against an older Johnson County woman totally embarrassed the usually cocksure Kobach. He had to meekly dismiss it days before it was to go to trial in April. In the four cases he has won, Kobach went after men 60 years or older who double-voted. None showed any intent to game the s…
Continue reading…AP: More than 116,000 people have signed an online petition urging the inspector general to investigate what it calls voter suppression at a federal government agency entrusted with making voting more accessible….
Continue reading…but agreed to pay a $5,500 fine to resolve the case. Weems, who was registered to vote in both Wichita and Teller County, Colo., according to records, is among the first Kansans prosecuted by Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office after the Legislature last July gave it the authority to criminally prosecute alleged election crimes. The case is the fourth prosecuted by Kobach’s office that has resulted in convictions….
Continue reading…s, including minorities. Ongoing lawsuits challenge the proof-of-citizenship requirements he wrote and shepherded through the Legislature. Craig McCullah, who is in charge of the office’s publications and a spokesman for Kobach, accepted responsibility for the errors and said they resulted from a clerical mistake in updating the guides for this year’s elections. Kobach is a national embarrassment, even if this is an innocent mistake….
Continue reading…o look into communications between that agency’s executive director, Brian Newby, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach….
Continue reading…is shown in Silver Spring, Md. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) But now Kobach is the gladiator in a different battle — a major figure in a national movement to add more requirements for Americans to vote or register to vote. Since the Supreme Court struck down in 2013 a key part of the Voting Rights Act, Kobach has been at the center of many legal skirmishes over voting requirements that have popped up nationwide. Sixteen states have made chan…
Continue reading…ans. Yes, including some of those back in Kansas, the home state of both men. All of this is frustrating for the people who have worked so hard across this country to battle the wrongheaded notion that voting rules must be tightened because voter fraud is “rampant.” That’s Kobach’s siren song to the ultra-conservative crowd in Kansas that has elected him to office. It’s how he got his powers to prosecute voter fraud, powers he’s used so far to alm…
Continue reading…ouhalkah for KC Star: Just how nefarious is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach when it comes to restricting voters’ rights? Slimy enough that it appears he helped former Johnson County election commissioner Brian Newby get a top job in Washington — after which Newby imposed new limits on voting in Kansas, Alabama and Georgia. Some of the calculating behind-the-scenes moves necessary to place Newby in his position of power are contained in this…
Continue reading…aud the people of Kansas.” “Look, just like police engage in racial profiling for a reason, there’s a reason we might want to target those who are different from normal Kansans for special scrutiny,” said Kobach, who has drawn the ire of Democrats and voting rights groups. Despite Kobach’s rhetoric, his office has uncovered and prosecuted only a handful of voter fraud claims in Kansas….
Continue reading…would enter the job empowered to lead the way I want to.” Voting rights advocates were stunned by Newby’s action once he got the job and have sued to overturn it. Activists say it flies in the face of the commission’s mission to provide a simple, easy form to encourage voter registration…. Kobach had appointed Newby to be a county elections commissioner in Kansas, and helped him get the federal job that he took in November. “I wanted you in the lo…
Continue reading…rcell screwed up. Maybe she doesn’t deserve to be in office after this screw up (thank goodness this was not for the general election and the race was not close). But I don’t see evidence she someone like a Kris Kobach trying to intentionally make it harder for likely Democrats to vote. But thank John Roberts and Co. that this did not get a closer look from federal officials before the election took place….
Continue readingMINUTE ORDER: On February 29, 2016, the Court held a conference call to hear any requests for expedited discovery in the above-captioned case. Upon due consideration of the parties’ oral arguments it is hereby ORDERED that defendant-intervenor the Kansas Secretary of State’s request to depose Commissioner Christy McCormick is GRANTED. Her deposition, however, must be taken on or before March 2, 2016 in Washington, D.C. It is further ORDERED that…
Continue reading…Red-baiting from one of our least favorite members of the fraudulent fraud squad. Despicable….
Continue reading…red to vote in Kansas. The list was sent by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who was requesting the change. Newby said in the deposition that after receiving the list from Kobach, “I began developing a point of view that previous decisions by the EAC might have been wrong.” In fact, the list, from Kansas’ Sedgwick County, showed that seven non-citizens registered in the decade before the state’s proof of citizenship law went into effect in 2…
Continue reading…e fact that only a small percentage of voters register in any given year…. Kobach also argued that the 2014 decision by the then-director of the election panel was essentially ghost written by lawyers in the Civil Rights Divison of the Justice Department. “It appears the Department of Justice decided they were going to take the helm at this unmanned ship and commandeer it,” he said. The letter from Newby and a current commissioner suggested that t…
Continue reading…Must-read Sari Horwitz in WaPo on what’s the matter with Kansas (hint: It’s Kris Kobach.)…
Continue reading…blocked from voting because of this bureaucratic hurdle….The complaint is at: https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/fish-v-kobach-complaint….
Continue reading…g their citizenship. Nearly identical requests from Arizona and Kansas have already been rejected by the EAC multiple times. Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a petition from Arizona and Kansas to hear Kobach v. United States Election Assistance Commission, thereby letting stand a 10th Circuit ruling that the states may not force applicants using the federal voter registration form to show documents….
Continue readingTPM: In an interview with TPM earlier this week, Kobach defended the move and Newby’s authority to issue it. He denied that it was any special favor from a former colleague, and said the state would have requested the proof-of-citizenship requirement no matter who stepped into the role of executive director of the commission. “We had the letter drafted long before Newby was selected and it was going to go to whoever the new executive director was…
Continue reading…fy the Federal Form.” William Lawrence, a Kansas lawyer who is challenging Kobach’s effort to remove the roughly 30,000 would-be voters who didn’t provide proof of citizenship, said the distinction Newby is seeking to draw doesn’t hold water…. Newby admitted to MSNBC he’d been in contact with Kobach on the issue, as well as with the secretaries of state of Alabama and Georgia. He said there was nothing improper about doing so, or about not includi…
Continue reading…ss is likely to continue for months, far past the state’s March 5 primary. Kobach’s push to require proof of citizenship is part of a larger, national fight over adding new voting restrictions, in what sponsors claim is an effort to prevent voter fraud. Opponents say it’s an effort to suppress voting rights. Among the many questions still to be answered: What, if anything, will the full commission do? What will happen with the legal battle? (Kobac…
Continue readingFollowing up on this post, the lone Democratic-appointed EAC Commissioner has issued this statement: http://www.eac.gov/assets/1/Documents/Statement%20by%20Commissioner%20Hicks%20NVRA%20Form%20(2-2-16)-1.pdf The Executive Director of the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC) issued letters to the states of Kansas, Georgia, and Alabama granting the states’ request to amend the state instructions to the federal voter registration form,…
Continue readingDoug Chapin: The timing of this action is a little curious, given the prospect of renewed partisan warfare over proof-of-citizenship just as the EAC is making progress on other fronts like voting technology and election preparedness. It also isn’t clear whether this action is an administrative matter solely within the purview of the executive director or whether it requires a vote of the Commission as a change of policy. [The Election Law Blog’s…
Continue reading…o provide proof of citizenship (as normal registration in Kansas now did), Kobach argued he did not need to accept the federal form. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and then through further litigation in the 10th Circuit (with cert. denied by the Supreme Court), establishing that Kobach was wrong: Congress had the authority under the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause to require states to accept the federal form for voting in fed…
Continue reading…fraud cases under a new statute. Lincoln Wilson faces felony charges from Kobach’s office accusing him of voting in both Colorado and Kansas in multiple elections – something Wilson admitted to doing and said he thought he was allowed to do in an October interview with The Eagle. His attorney, Jeff Mason, tried to get the case thrown out of court on the grounds that Assistant Secretary of State Eric Rucker is prosecuting the case rather than Koba…
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