Kris Kobach’s Voter Suppression Law Was Just Struck Down in Kansas

And the judge ordered the Yale-educated Kansas secretary of state to do six hours of continuing legal education.
PEMA LEVY JUN. 18, 2018 9:40 PM



https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/kris-kobachs-voter-suppression-law-was-just-struck-down-in-kansas/

A federal judge on Monday struck down a 2013 Kansas law that required people to provide proof of citizenship such as a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote. The decision deals a major blow to efforts by conservative activists to erect barriers to voting under the pretense that voter fraud is rampant. The law, Judge Julie Robinson determined, violated the 1993 National Voter Registration Act and the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

“The Court determines that the magnitude of potentially disenfranchised voters impacted by the DPOC law and its enforcement scheme cannot be justified by the scant evidence of noncitizen voter fraud,” Robinson ruled. Rather than combat fraud, the judge found, the law had disenfranchised many eligible voters. By 2016, the legislation had caused more than 16,000 voter registrations to be canceled and it had blocked more than 31,000 Kansans from registering to vote.

Republican Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and force behind the law, defended it himself in court. Currently a candidate for governor, Kobach became a national figure as the architect of Arizona’s harsh anti-immigrant law in 2010. Today, he is the country’s top advocate for laws that suppress access to the ballot, such as voter ID laws and proof of citizenship requirements. He claims his efforts are based on the idea that voter fraud is a pervasive problem, though studies show it is exceedingly rare.

Kobach also led President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission last year, which the president created after alleging that as many as 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election—an assertion Kobach refused to dispute despite no evidence for it. The panel became mired in lawsuits for failing to follow numerous federal laws and was disbanded in January.