America's No. 1 voter fraud conspiracy theorist goes down in court
By David Von Drehle
Columnist
June 19 at 6:23 PM
Kris Kobach’s collection of sheepskins suggests a pretty big brain to go with his tall, broad-shouldered frame. The right-wing candidate for Kansas governor has degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Yale. But to watch him war with figments of his imagination — a fictional army of fraudulent voters — makes one think of that old ad campaign: A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
On Monday, the chief of the U.S. District Court in Kansas, Judge Julie A. Robinson, popped the bubble of Kobach’s obsession. She ruled, after a lengthy trial, that Kobach, Kansas’s secretary of state, produced no credible support for his theory that large numbers of noncitizens are illegally voting in American elections. Thus, the Kobach-inspired law requiring Kansas voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship is unconstitutional because it imposes the burden without a reasonable justification.
“At most, 67 noncitizens registered or attempted to register in Kansas over the last 19 years,” the judge found. Of those, only 39, at most, actually ended up on voter rolls, put there largely by clerical mistakes, not fraud. They went to the motor vehicles department for a driver’s license and accidentally registered to vote. “Some applicants told the . . . clerk that they were not citizens, yet the clerk completed a voter registration application” anyway.
“Given the almost 2 million individuals on the Kansas voter rolls, some administrative anomalies are expected,” the judge continued. After all, the Kansas rolls indicate that 100 voters were born in the 1800s — highly unlikely given the scarcity of 120-year-old Kansans. For that matter, human errors have recorded 400 Kansas voters as having birth dates subsequent to their dates of registration.
This case was no mere tempest in Topeka. Kobach, as much as any individual, is the author of right-wing mania over mass voter fraud. Tilting at the windmills of his mind, he has traveled far and wide promoting his theories to state legislators and Republican policy groups. When President Trump urgently sought to wave away Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin of more than 2.8 million in 2016, it was Kobach to the rescue. A week after a visit from the Kansas conspiracy theorist, the president-elect tweeted: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Impressed by his fellow birther, Trump appointed Kobach vice chairman of an ill-starred commission on supposed voter fraud; it fizzled like a wet matchstick. By then, Kobach was busy again back home, defending his crackpot theories in Robinson’s courtroom.
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