The EconomistJuly 22nd 2017 United States 271“S
PRECHEN Sie Deutsch?” asks Kris Ko-
bach. Sitting at his office desk sur-
rounded by family photos of his wife and
five daughters, the Kansas secretary of
state explains (in German) that he picked
up the language when conducting research
on the influence of referendums on Swit-
zerland’s political system for a thesis at
Britain’s Oxford University in the late
1980s. Mr Kobach became interested in
electoral law during his Swiss research, an
interest which subsequently developed
into a fixation with voter fraud. He is also,
after successfully lobbying Kansas’s gover-
nor to change the rules, the only secretary
of state in the land with the power to pros-
ecute people for it.
Mr Kobach’s other favourite topic is ille-
gal immigration, which he became inter-
ested in at Yale Law School. An avid debat-
er, he joined a panel on California’s
Proposition 187, a ballot initiative passed in
1994 denying government services to ille-
gal immigrants. Mr Kobach fervently de-
fended Prop 187, caring little that it was an
unpopular stance at the elite Ivy League
school. “He came across as a cultural war-
rior,” says Jed Shugerman at Fordham Law
School, who was among the standing-
room only audience of around 300. Mr Ko-
bach’s rhetoric, says Mr Shugerman, was
much more nativist and anti-immigrant
than was the norm among most conserva-
tives at the time.
Today Mr Kobach has a national plat-
form for his two fixations, which come to-gether in an effort to detect voter fraud by
non-citizens (or aliens, as he refers to
them). He is vice-chair of the advisory
commission on election integrity, chaired
by Mike Pence, the vice-president, and es-
tablished by President Donald Trump
through an executive order in May. It met
officially for the first time on July 19th.
During the election campaign, Mr
Trump became a fervent proponent of the
idea that America suffers from widespread
voter fraud. He claimed that if he lost it
would be because the election was tainted
by millions of fraudulent votes, many of
them cast by illegal immigrants (Mr Ko-
bach advises the president on immigration
policy too). After he won, Mr Trump did
not let the idea go, declaring that he would
have won the popular vote had 3m-5m
votes not been cast illegally. The commis-
sion, set up to investigate what seems to be
a non-problem, has a budget of $500,000.The usual suspects
Research reports collected for years by the
Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York
University School of Law show that voter
fraud in general and by non-citizens in par-
ticular is extraordinarily rare. In his own
state, Mr Kobach has prosecuted just nine
cases of voter fraud of which only one was
a foreigner, a Peruvian who was in the pro-
cess of becoming an American citizen
when he voted. (Mr Kobach says that he
knows of another 128 cases in Kansas but
he cannot go after them because of the stat-ute of limitations.) “Why would an undoc-
umented immigrant risk deportation and a
fine by voting, especially as immigration
officials regularly check electoral rolls?”
asks Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, au-
thor of one of the Brennan Centre reports.
To counter the consensus among politi-
cal scientists that voter fraud is very rare,
Mr Kobach and other believers in wide-
spread fraud cite a paper by Jesse Richman
and others at Virginia’s Old Dominion
University, which shows up to 15% of non-
citizens surveyed voted at the presidential
election in 2008. The controversial study,
published in 2014, relied on just 339 respon-
dents. The authors of that report warned
that, “it isimpossible to tell for certain
whether the non-citizens who responded
to the survey were representative of the
broader population of non-citizens.” Mr
Kobach hired Mr Richman to look at Kan-
sas, where he used a grand total of 37 re-
spondents to come up with the figure of
more than 18,000 non-citizen voters.
Mr Trump’s commission on election in-
tegrity got off to a rocky start. On June 28th
it sent out letters to all 50 states demanding
data on their voters thatare publicly avail-
able under the laws of the respective state,
including names, dates of birth, political
party, last four digits oftheir Social Security
number, voter history from 2006, felony
convictions and more. An outcry ensued,
in Republican and Democratic states alike.
“They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico
and Mississippi is a great state to launch
from,” fumed Delbert Hosemann, the Re-
publican secretary of state in Mississippi.
Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic governor
of Virginia, said he had no intention of
honouring the commission’s request.
Fourteen states, including California and
Kentucky, flat-out refused to respond to the
letter, says Mr Kobach. Another16 said they
are reviewing the letter, whereas 20 said
they would comply by sending publicly
available data.
The commission was also hit by three
lawsuits, filed separately bythe American
Civil Liberties Union, the Lawyers’ Com-
mittee for Civil Rights Under Law and Pub-
lic Citizen. They claim the purported mis-
sion of the commission is a sham, and that
its true goal is to introduce stringent qualifi-
cations on voting that would mainly disen-
franchise minority voters. The Electronic
Privacy Information Centre filed a suit on
July 3rd, claiming the commission’s re-
quest violates the E-Government Act of
2002, which obliges the government to as-
sess the consequences ofits actions public-
ly before seeking personal information
stored electronically.
On July 13th the White House released
112 pages with over 30,000 public com-
ments on the Trump-Pence commission,
nearly all of them negative or sarcastic. “Hi,
I voted in all 50 states. Just wanted you to
know. Love, Beau in Oklahoma,” readsVoting lawsKris Kobach’s crusade
TOPEKA, KANSAS
After a vehement backlash, the future of Donald Trump’s election-fraud
commission is uncertain