Research reports collected for years by the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law show that voter fraud in general and by non-citizens in particular is extraordinarily rare. In his own state, Mr Kobach has prosecuted just nine cases of voter fraud of which only one was a foreigner, a Peruvian who was in the process of becoming an American citizen when he voted. (Mr Kobach says that he knows of another 128 cases in Kansas but he cannot go after them because of the statute of limitations.) “Why would an undocumented immigrant risk deportation and a fine by voting, especially as immigration officials regularly check electoral rolls?” asks Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, author of one of the Brennan Centre reports.
To counter the consensus among political scientists that voter fraud is very rare, Mr Kobach and other believers in widespread fraud cite a paper by Jesse Richman and others at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, which shows up to 15% of non-citizens surveyed voted at the presidential election in 2008. The controversial study, published in 2014, relied on just 339 respondents. The authors of that report warned that, “it is impossible to tell for certain whether the non-citizens who responded to the survey were representative of the broader population of non-citizens.” Mr Kobach hired Mr Richman to look at Kansas, where he used a grand total of 37 respondents to come up with the figure of more than 18,000 non-citizen voters.