In his day job as Kansas’ secretary of state, where he plays the “Javert of voter fraud”, Kobach complains that the media’s response to his efforts to safeguard America’s elections is a dismissive, “Move along, there’s nothing to see here”.
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In the September 7 article, Kobach said out-of-state voters “likely” changed – through voter fraud – the outcome of New Hampshire’s 2016 U.S. Senate race, in which Democrat Maggie Hassan unseated incumbent Republican Kelly Ayotte by fewer than 800 votes.
Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State and a Republican candidate for governor, is the vice chair of the new presidential investigation into “voter integrity”.
University of New Hampshire political science professor Andrew Smith told the panel a college student could have a MA driver’s license and license plates, pay the out-of-state tuition rate and still lawfully vote in New Hampshire if that’s where they’re living at the time. “I will not either”. Gardner also noted the opposition the commission has faced from its beginning.
“You have Republicans generally worrying about ineligible people voting and Democrats largely thinking Republicans are just imagining things.it might be a solution that pleases both sides”, he said. When he won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, he claimed he would have won that, too, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”.
Kobach claimed that “now there’s proof” of voter fraud in last year’s election, enough to have likely changed the outcome of a key Senate race. He said that’s proof that voter fraud occurred. It could be taking a hard look at how to encourage states to explore virtually hack-proof vote-by-mail systems like the one OR uses.
Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (D) emerged as the panel’s most aggressive Democrat on Tuesday, tangling with a witness and using part of his time to passively push back against Kobach’s claims about New Hampshire’s 2016 elections.
“As he said, if three to five million people voted illegally, then we’ve got real problems in this country and I think we want to address them, but I don’t think for a minute we’re going to find anything close to that”, he said. He renewed his views on Tuesday.
Kris Kobach may have thought he had a slam dunk case when he showed up in New Hampshire Tuesday to claim mass voter fraud.
The panel has also been widely criticized by state election officials for requesting that they share detailed voter information with the panel.
“The data is not standardized between states, the data quality is poor in some states and there’s a lack of transparency”, Block said.
As the traditional host of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary, New Hampshire residents revel in the national political spotlight when voters head to the polls.
One man’s mother, who was in a “memory care” ward of a nursing home and deemed too incapacitated to vote, somehow still managed to have a ballot cast in her name in Florida.
On Tuesday, a new state voter ID law takes effect, enacted by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed in July by Gov. Chris Sununu.
Kobach’s decision to write as a paid columnist for Breitbart, which Bannon called “the platform for the Alt-Right”, is raising questions of its own: George W. Bush’s ethics lawyer Richard Palmer told The Huffington Post that Kobach could be in violation of federal conflict of interest statutes by “getting paid by somebody to write about your official duties”.
Kobach’s evidence for these explosive claims? To be clear, there is no proof of widespread illegal voting or voter fraud in the 2016 election – or in any American election.
It’s an underappreciated point: Kobach has been caught lying about voter fraud while helping lead a White House commission on voter fraud.
Allegations that the (fake) reports of widespread fraud are undermining faith in the voting system – thus justifying actions to purge millions from the rolls and restrict voting.
The Commission later clarified that it was only seeking information that can be legally obtained by members of the public.
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Instead of trying to build specious justifications for legislation that makes it harder for citizens to vote, Kobach’s commission could be working to develop ways to modernize voting machines and safeguard election systems against hacking.
