Shawnee County District Judge Larry Hendricks issued a temporary order Friday to block a rule from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Advertisement
The back-and-forth legal wranglings over the state’s two-tiered voting system continued Friday as a Shawnee County judge said the current setup must end. Kobach says the decision weakens the state’s voter registration law.
“It essentially knocks a huge loophole in that law”, he said, of its impact on the citizenship requirement.
“This ruling is a strong rebuke of Secretary Kobach’s efforts to obstruct voters”, said Sophia Lakin, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project who argued the case in Topeka.
Voting has already been underway in Kansas for more than two weeks.
Hendricks acknowledged that some of the affected voters have already cast advance ballots, and it’s unknown whether they complied with instructions they were given at the time only to mark their ballot for federal offices.
A federal judge ruled last month that people who registered at the DMV but didn’t prove their citizenship should be allowed to vote, at least in federal races. Kobach had directed local election officials to count only their votes in federal races, not state and local ones. Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman said Friday that she’s still waiting for instructions from the state on how the process of counting those voters’ ballots will work.
But the temporary injunction affects only the August 2 primary, an election in which some people have already cast ballots, including some of the voters who were told they were only eligible to vote in federal races.
Lehman estimates that adding the 4200 voters to the poll books could take as long as 40 hours. United States district judge James Peterson issued a ruling on Friday that upheld the voter ID law but struck down a number of Republican-written statutes and policies that restricted voting.
Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has led the push to a system where people without citizenship proof can only vote in federal races, was disappointed in the ruling, saying: “Sometimes you have close elections and if you have aliens voting in the election, those votes end up canceling out USA citizens and potentially stealing the election”. The order came four days before Tuesday’s primary election.
Judge Larry Hendricks rejected legal arguments delivered by Kobach, who answered a separate federal lawsuit by orchestrating election rules requiring county officials to disregard votes cast Tuesday and November 8 in local and state elections.
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 vote on all races when the state holds its primary elections Tuesday. It would have applied to people who register to vote at state motor vehicle offices without providing proof of their US citizenship as required by a 2013 state law.
Bryan Caskey, who heads the Division of Elections in the secretary of state’s office, said he believes voters affected by the decision still will have to cast provisional ballots, which are set aside on election night and not counted until the county’s Board of Canvassers meets the following week.
Kobach’s office proposed the new rule earlier this month in response to ruling by a federal court in Kansas City, Kan., which said the proof-of-citizenship law likely violates the federal National Voter Registration Act, also known as the “motor voter” law.
District Judge Larry Hendricks makes a comment during a hearing on requiring the state to count potentially thousands of votes in state and local elections from people who’ve registered without providing proof of their USA citizenship, Friday, July 29, 2016, in Topeka, Kan.
Kobach, a conservative Republican, has championed the state’s proof-of-citizenship requirement as a measure to fight election fraud. Under a Kansas law backed by Kobach, registrants must offer proof they are a US citizen.
Critics of proof-of-citizenship requirements say they suppress voter turnout – particularly among young and minority voters – far more than they combat fraud.
Alabama, Arizona and Georgia have similar proof-of-citizenship but Kansas has gone the furthest to enforce its law.
Advertisement
Shawnee County District Court Judge Franklin Theis previously ruled Kobach had unilaterally established an unlawful voter registration system by differentiating among those who used the state and federal forms.
