The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Seven: Kris Kobach and Other Bad People

If there is one person in America besides Donald Trump who deserves his own article in a series about destroying democracy, it's Kris Kobach. Mister Kobach is the Secretary of State of Kansas, and was until recently vice chair of President Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

I had sat down prepared to research and write a complete history of the trail of slime Kris Kobach has extruded over the country for the past few years, but as is often the case on the subject of politics, someone has already written that article for me. I urge you to read Kris Kobach is a Loser by Mark Joseph Stern of slate.com.

To summarize, upon his election in Kansas Mr. Kobach began a sustained campaign to convince America that vast numbers of people are voting fraudulently and that the country needs stricter voter ID laws. He got his voter ID law in Kansas all right, but his war on voters failed to identify any fraud. Never mind that, he's just the guy Donald Trump needed for a "Commission on Election Integrity" given that Trump believes that "millions" voted illegally for Hillary Clinton. Again Kobach failed miserably to identify any voter fraud. Then, (from the March, 2018 article linked above,) "Kobach limped home to Kansas to prepare for a bench trial over his proof-of-citizenship law. That trial, which began earlier this month and is ongoing, has been an unmitigated disaster for Kobach—a merciless rebuke of his professional life’s work. The trouble actually began well before the trial started, when a federal judge fined Kobach $1,000 in June for making "patently misleading representations to the court" about a document he’d taken to his initial meeting with Trump, one that proposed eviscerating a federal voting rights law." The author concludes, "Kobach’s national crusade against the phantom threat of voter fraud quickly collapsed under the weight of his own arrogance."

So has Kobach actually done more harm than good for the Republican case against "voter fraud"? Depends on how you look at it. As Republican strategist Karl Rove has pointed out, Republicans are no longer part of the "reality-based community". Do cigarettes cause cancer? We don't know; there's only a "controversy". Is the evolution of species a fact? How about global warming? Well, those elitist atheistic scientists say one thing, but who listens to them? So it goes with voter fraud. Donald Trump and Kris Kobach say one thing, and everyone else may say the opposite, but for the media and many Americans the only question is whom do they trust more, and who appears to be winning the argument.

For a few Americans, it must be noted, Kris Kobach and others like him really are a personal nightmare. That's because in their zealous campaign to prove that there is some "voter fraud" somewhere, Kobach and others have ruthlessly prosecuted people who have made innocent mistakes in attempting to vote. Kobach has pressed charges against several senior citizens who thought they could vote on local issues in each of the states where they owned homes. Interestingly, all but one of Kobach's cases have been filed against Republicans; remember, this entire campaign is based on the idea that Democrats are the ones voting illegally.

Pity poor Crystal Mason of Tarrant County, Texas. Ms. Mason voted in the 2016 presidential election while she was on supervised release from a 2011 fraud conviction. Although she was never made aware that she was not eligible to vote, a judge has sentenced her to five years in prison. I wonder how many people who are eligible vote but have past criminal convictions will look at cases like Crystal Mason's and become afraid to vote themselves. And I suspect that's exactly what Republicans hope will happen. People of color are more likely to have past criminal convictions that whites, and race certainly plays a factor in formal challenges to the right to vote in America. A Caltech/MIT study found that minority voters are more frequently questioned about ID than are white voters.

Here's another way to stop the poor and minorities from voting. In North Carolina, some Republicans with too much time on their hands have been challenging the voter registrations of black Democrats. In 2016, Grace Bell Hardison, a 100-year-old African-American woman, was informed that her voter-registration status had been challenged by Republicans because a piece of mail sent to her home address had been returned as undeliverable. Ms. Hardison normally receives mail at a PO Box. The NAACP has stated that the voter purge that targeted Hardison violates the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits the mass removal of voters from the rolls within the 90 days prior to the election. "These purges have a long history of being racial and inaccurate," says Penda Hair, a lawyer for the North Carolina NAACP.

All of these efforts have the same goal: to reduce Democratic turnout. Shortly before the 2016 election, Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg of Bloomberg visited the Trump campaign and learned that, "Instead of expanding the electorate, (campaign chief executive Steve) Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. "We have three major voter suppression operations under way," says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans."

Thank you, Mister Trump campaign guy, your candor is refreshing.

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