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....

In retrospect, Kobach may be a victim of his own success — or a textbook example of the Peter Principle, which holds that people tend to rise to their level of incompetence. Winning the post of secretary of state in 2010 placed him in charge of Kansas elections, giving him the tools he needed to prove the righteousness of his quest. Like Joseph McCarthy waving his phony list of communists, Kobach reached a point where he had to put up or shut up.

But that’s been just another fizzle. As the judge acidly noted: “Defendant already has prosecutorial authority over Kansas election crimes. Yet, since obtaining this authority .?.?. Defendant has filed zero criminal complaints against noncitizens for registering to vote.”

In 1962, Rehnquist was the leader of Operation Eagle Eye, a crew of Republican lawyers who roamed precincts in south Phoenix challenging the qualifications of minority voters. Rehnquist's role in the actual interrogation of blacks and Latinos waiting to vote is murky. At Senate hearings on his nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971 and to the chief's spot in 1986, Rehnquist denied "challenging the qualifications of any voters."

But several witnesses -- including San Francisco lawyer James Brosnahan -- told a different story.

Brosnahan testified at the 1986 hearings that in 1962, when he was an assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix, he received complaints that GOP operatives were stalling voters at a heavily Democratic precinct by accusing minorities of being unable to read. Some states had long used literacy tests to prevent minorities from voting, but federal law banned the practice in 1964.

The trial had a significance that extends far beyond the Jayhawk state. One of the fundamental questions in the debate over alleged voter fraud — whether a substantial number of non-citizens are in fact registering to vote — was one of two issues to be determined in the Kansas proceedings. (The second was whether there was a less burdensome solution than what Kansas had adopted.) That made the trial a telling opportunity to remove the voter fraud claims from the charged, and largely proof-free, realms of political campaigns and cable news shoutfests and examine them under the exacting strictures of the rules of evidence.

That’s precisely what occurred and according to Robinson, an appointee of George W. Bush, the proof that voter fraud is widespread was utterly lacking. As the judge put it, “the court finds no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote” even under the previous law, which Kobach had claimed was weak......

Richman had played a small but significant part in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump and others had cited his work to claim that illegal votes had robbed Trump of the popular vote. At an October 2016 rally in Wisconsin, the candidate cited Richman’s work to bolster his predictions that the election would be rigged. “You don’t read about this, right?” Trump told the crowd, before reading from an op-ed Richman had written for The Washington Post: “‘We find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in various close elections.’ Okay? All right?”

Richman’s 2014 study of non-citizen registration used data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — an online survey of more than 32,000 people. Of those, fewer than 40 individuals indicated they were non-citizens registered to vote. Based on that sample, Richman concluded that up to 2.8 million illegal votes had been cast in 2008 by non-citizens. In fact, he put the illegal votes at somewhere between 38,000 and 2.8 million — a preposterously large range — and then Trump and others simply used the highest figure.....

On the courtroom’s televisions, Kobach appeared, saying Trump’s tweet was “absolutely correct.” Without naming Richman, Kobach referred to his study: The number of non-citizens who said they’d voted in 2008 was far larger than the popular vote margin, Kobach said on the video. The same number likely voted again in 2016.

In the courtroom, Ho asked Richman if he believed his research supported such a claim. Richman stammered. He repeatedly looked at Kobach, seemingly searching for a way out. Ho persisted and finally, Richman gave his answer: “I do not believe my study provides strong support for that notion.”