Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State and head of Trump’s ill-fated electoral fraud commission, has led the charge against voting rights with bogus claims about rampant voter fraud. But a case in his home state has finally put Kobach’s voter fraud data to the test and it was found wanting. The case was brought by a group of 35,000 Kansas residents who were legally allowed to vote but denied that right because of the voting restrictions put in place by Kobach before the 2016 election.
Back in May of 2016, a US District judge ruled that Kobach’s voting restrictions violated the National Right to Vote Act (NVRA). The judge issued an injunction that not only kept Kobach from proceeding with his restrictions but also ordered that 18,000 Kansans who had not been able to register because they did not have a birth certificate or passport be added to the rolls. The trial to resolve the legality of those voting restrictions has now begun, with Kobach determined to show that massive voter fraud in the state required the implementation of his restrictions.
Kobach and his legal team were clearly
unprepared and unfamiliar with actual court proceedings as they continually tried to introduce evidence long after the deadline for sharing evidence with the plaintiffs had passed, forcing the judge at the trial to have to continually lecture them about how court proceedings actually work.
Worse,
the “data” that Kobach presented to “prove” voter fraud was truly laughable. Kobach’s star witness, Hans von Spakovsky, was demolished on the stand by the ACLU lawyer representing the plaintiffs. von Spakovsky could not point to one election where non-voters were decisive. He cited an NBC News report that 100 registered voters filled out jury-duty questionnaires saying they were non-citizens but failed to note the follow up to that story that found that around one third of those were actually citizens.
In fact, the bulk of van Spakovsky’s “proof” relied on a spreadsheet from Kobach’s office itself that showed 30 non-citizens trying to register to vote in just one county over an 18 year period. From that, van Spakovsky extrapolated his numbers of massive voter fraud. But van Spakovsky was forced to admit under questioning that he had no basis for knowing whether those numbers were actually true or whether they reflected confusion or some sort of administrative error. In addition, von Spakovsky was flummoxed by the point that the judge actually made, which was that dilution effect of having non-citizens vote was identical to blocking legitimate voters from voting.
Another of Kobach’s witnesses had compiled a list of 18,000 non-citizens in Kansas who had registered or attempted to register to vote. Under questioning, however, he was forced to admit that he compiled the list simply by picking out foreign sounding names. This was the level of evidence introduced by Kobach.
So, the case for Kobach looks pretty grim at this point. But there had been plenty of action in this case even before this phase had begun.
Kobach originally refused to comply with the judge’s order to restore those 18,000 Kansans to the voter rolls and instead decided he would make them fill out provisional ballots which he would count. The ACLU filed a motion to object to this procedure and the judge ordered Kobach to explain why he had ignored her order. One day before she was about to cite him for contempt, Kobach complied. The ACLU asked Kobach to provide the documents on voter fraud that he was seen carrying into a meeting with Trump. Kobach lied to the judge and claimed that those documents were irrelevant to the Kansas case when in fact the opposite was true.
In addition, Kobach apparently violated another part of the original court order in this case. The ACLU “exhaustively documented Kobach’s refusal to send certificates to voters who tried to register but lacked proof of citizenship. These certificates state critical information, such as voters’ precincts, polling location, and districts for different offices. The ACLU also demonstrated that Kobach had refused to correct extremely deceptive information in the official Kansas election manual that suggested these voters could not lawfully cast a ballot.”
Yesterday, the judge ruled Kobach in contempt of court for refusing to send those certificates to voters as well as the refusal to correct the election manual as previously instructed by the judge. The judge’s ruling was scathing and encompassed much of Kobach’s behavior since the injunction was ordered, saying, “the Court is troubled by Defendant’s failure to take responsibility for violating this Court’s orders, and for failing to ensure compliance over an issue that he explicitly represented to the Court had been accomplished…Defendant deflected blame for his failure to comply onto county officials, and onto his own staff, some of whom are not licensed attorneys.” She refused to apply coercive sanctions since Kobach had finally but belatedly complied with the injunction but ordered Kobach to pay the ACLU’s attorneys’ fees.
Now maybe I’m just a wee bit old fashioned, but it bothers me that just one woman who mistakenly voted illegally in Texas could get five years in jail but a man who not only violated a court order but also lied to the court about those violations in order to prevent perhaps thousands from voting who were legally allowed to do so merely has pay the attorney’s fees of those whose rights were abridged.
Worse, Kobach’s actions are reflective of the current and, in this case, literal, contempt for the courts from the Republican party as a whole when it comes to gerrymandering and voting rights. In Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas, Republicans continually appeal federal judges’ decisions on illegally gerrymandered districts, with the delay disenfranchising voters over multiple election cycles. In addition, these GOP-dominated legislatures basically redraw similarly illegal districts when forced to do so by the courts, again extending the disenfranchisement of voters. In Pennsylvania, the State Supreme Court is being threatened with impeachment over its decision declaring that the state’s districts are illegally partisan gerrymandered. Apparently, when it comes to voting rights, the current GOP believes the courts are more of a nuisance than an equal branch of government. And Kobach has demonstrated that in the most extreme way.
