Kris Kobach - High Priest of the Voter Fraud Myth

While Jeff Sessions is busy seeking a crackdown on marijuana users as a means to disenfranchise blacks and youth with a goal of adding Republican electoral chances, Kris Kobach, the de facto head of President Trump’s commission on voting integrity, is seeking to use the myth of voter fraud to disenfranchise even more Americans.  Besides minority voters, Kobach is especially hostile to young voters who disapprove of the GOP by some 70+%.  College students are a particularly favored target of Kobach who I have heard on radio interviews engaging in lots of fancy footwork to hide his still very discernible racism.  Rather than admit that a majority of Americans dislike the GOP's increasingly Christofascist/white supremacist and pro-wealthy agenda, Kobach's solution is to mere winnow the voter pool to eliminate potential Democrat voters.  The man embodies some of the ugliest elements of today's GOP.  A main editorial in the Washington Post looks at the fraud Kobach seeks to work on the American public.  Here are excerpts:

NEW HAMPSHIRE is a small state whose biggest residential college and university campuses are dominated by out-of-state students — tens of thousands of them. Under New Hampshire law, they are entitled to vote in state elections, an unremarkable and widely known fact that easily explains why several thousand ballots were cast there last November by voters who registered on Election Day using out-of-state driver’s licenses.

Yet to Kris Kobach, the de facto head of President Trump’s commission on voting integrity, those votes are somehow “proof” that an invading horde of out-of-staters took advantage of the Granite State’s same-day registration law to cast “fraudulent votes.” In fact, there’s no evidence of that.

The real fraud is Mr. Kobach himself, Kansas’s Republican secretary of state and a gubernatorial candidate, who will torture any truth, distort any data and fudge any fact in service to his long-standing goal of suppressing votes, specifically those likely to favor Democrats. Having established himself in his home state as a propagandist, he is now peddling his claptrap on the national stage.

His method is to cite real numbers, then draw risible and extravagantly sinister conclusions from them.

In the case of the Granite State, he cites official figures from last fall’s elections, when 6,540 voters registered to vote and cast a ballot on Election Day. Of those voters, more than 80 percent, or 5,313, had neither been issued a New Hampshire license nor registered a car in the state 10 months later.

Aha, says Mr. Kobach, writing at Breitbart, the right-wing website, “now there’s proof” of fraud: “It seems that they never were bona fide residents of the State.”

In fact, when New Hampshire Public Radio examined the data earlier this year, it found that more than two-thirds of 5,900 day-of-election registrants who had out-of-state driver’s licenses lived in college towns, indicating most were students voting perfectly legally. 

[O]n Tuesday Mr. Kobach attempted to defend his baseless claim at a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Under fire for his tendentious claims, which he used to cast doubt on the narrow victories in New Hampshire of Hillary Clinton and now-Sen. Maggie Hassan, both Democrats, he said: “Until further research is done, we will never know the answer regarding the legitimacy of this particular election.”

That’s Mr. Kobach at his most insidious, using innuendo, but never actual evidence, to impugn and subvert American democracy.
 

The fact that Kobach is a Breitbart columnist speaks volumes about his detachment from objective reality and his racist, alt-right tendencies.  It goes without say that his gubernatorial campaign webpage is hysterically anti-immigrant.  I can only wonder what he will try to concoct to disenfranchise LGBT voters three quarters of whom or more vote Democrat.