Unsealed Documents Show That Kris Kobach Is Dead Set on Suppressing the Right to Vote

[riversedge]

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https://www.aclu.org/blog/voting-rights/fighting-voter-suppression/unsealed-documents-show-kris-kobach-dead-set

Unsealed Documents Show That Kris Kobach Is Dead Set on Suppressing the Right to Vote




By Orion Danjuma, Staff Attorney, ACLU Racial Justice Program
October 26, 2017 | 6:00 PM


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The unsealed materials confirm what many have suspected: Kobach has a ready-made plan to gut core voting rights protections enshrined in federal law. And he has been covertly lobbying Trump’s team and other officials from day one to sell them the falsehood that noncitizens are swinging elections.

As the de facto head of President Trump’s election commission, Kobach has positioned himself to lead an all-out assault on the right to vote.

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Here are three big plays from Kobach’s voter suppression playbook.
Play 1: Disenfranchise new voters with severe registration restrictions

Before Kris Kobach took office as secretary of state, Kansans could register to vote the same way that people do in virtually every other state in the country: by submitting a sworn oath of citizenship under penalty of perjury. In 2013, Kobach implemented a law he had pushed through the Kansas Legislature two years earlier, requiring people to track down a citizenship document — such as a passport or birth certificate — or be barred from the ballot box. The new system proved disastrous for ordinary voters.

Large numbers of citizens — disproportionately minorities — don’t have a passport or birth certificate on hand and don’t have the money to obtain replacement documents. By December 2015, more than 35,000 Kansans had been disenfranchised — approximately 14 percent of all registration applications since the requirement went into effect. The National Voter Registration Act — popularly known as the Motor-Voter law — prohibits unduly harsh registration rules and requires that states make voter registration easy and straightforward.

Kobach’s severe documentation requirements violated the NVRA so we sued. In October 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit blocked the requirement for people registering at DMVs. The opinion by a George W. Bush-appointed judge found that Kobach’s law had caused a “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.” The court noted that before a state could impose such sweeping restrictions, there would need to be proof that significant numbers of noncitizens were actually registering to vote. But Kobach had no evidence of any real problem. He could only offer “pure speculation” that hordes of invisible immigrants were hiding out in voting booths.




Play 2: If the law doesn’t let you suppress the vote, pull some strings to get rid of the law

Without evidence or legal arguments in his favor, Kobach’s next move was to try to eviscerate the NVRA itself. As Kobach knew, and the ACLU had made clear in court, the NVRA would need to be completely rewritten for a state official like Kobach to have the authority to impose such severe restrictions on the right to vote:



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Kobach Document Screenshot

So what did Kobach do after losing in court? As the unsealed documents show, he secretly prepared a draft amendment that would rewrite the NVRA in exactly this manner.


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Kobach Document Screenshot 2

No evidence of noncitizen voter fraud? No problem..............



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[Gothmog]

1. Kobach is a nasty person who wants to steal elections

[Wellstone ruled]

2. Fully funded by the Koch Brothers.

This has been the game plan of the John Bircher's from day one.

[diva77]

5. he is like Kenneth Blackwell on steroids!!

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/4/20/1654273/-Kremlingate-Election-Tampering-and-the-Kansan-Troika


Kremlingate, Election Tampering and the Kansan Troika
By Mopshell
Thursday Apr 20, 2017 · 6:03 AM PDT

SNIP Kobach was one of the early members brought onto the transition team though nobody seems to know how or by whom. Outwardly Kobach is state, not federal, and had no apparent links to the Trump campaign until you dig a little — turns out he was a prominent voice on the platform committee at the GOP convention. An even deeper excavation reveals that Kobach has fingers in multiple pies and none of them are the emblematically-patriotic American apple pie.

SNIP
Kobach certainly sticks out from the usual SoS crowd. He came up with the idea of “self-deportation” for illegal immigrants, an idea Mitt Romney unsuccessfully took into his 2012 campaign. He also wrote Arizona’s strict “show me your papers” immigration law and contributed to the Republican Platform at last year’s GOP convention.

As a delightfully sarcastic Christopher Brauchli wrote for The Huffington Post:

One of his accomplishments was getting language inserted into the platform that addresses the border wall Donald Trump has proposed. The language that he caused to be inserted states that: “The border wall must cover the entirety of the southern border and must be sufficient to stop both vehicular and pedestrian traffic.” The Platform Committee also responded favorably to Mr. Kobach’s suggestion that the platform condemn the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court opinion legalizing gay marriage, a decision he called “obviously incorrect.”

SNIP
But Kobach’s talents aren’t limited to devious anti-immigration ideas. His real forté is voter suppression. Does the term “Crosscheck” ring a bell?

The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.

That powerful Republican operative has to be Kris Kobach, the architect of Crosscheck. He also writes laws for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — another Koch-funded group — and disseminates them to republican states so he’s very well known to them all. (Almost all major republican legislation at state level is written for them by ALEC.)

He’s also the most travelled of all the state SoSes, touring various red states, no doubt checking in to see if they have met their Crosscheck targets and advising his fellow SoSes of his latest electoral strategies. If you’re looking for the Election-Rigger-in-Chief — and those of us concerned about electoral fraud should be — Kris Kobach has to be the #1 suspect.

Funded by the Kochs, given extraordinary powers by Governor Brownback, organiser of and adviser to republican secretaries of state and the Trump transition team, he’s the obvious mastermind yet he’s largely gone under the radar of mainstream media. They’ve reported on bits here and pieces there but none so far have joined all the dots to get the big picture, perhaps because the MSM is so unwilling to concede that electoral fraud exists at all.
SNIP

[Wellstone ruled]

6. This is nothing more than a effert to

save what is called the White Christian segment of the Population from those Brown Skinned People.

One of the Bircher principles is,land owners would be the only ones who would have the right to vote.

Pure Racism...

[tblue37]

3. K&R for visibility. nt

[riversedge]

4. :-)

[StevieM]

7. Kris Kobach is terrifying. He strikes me as a future dictator of America. (eom)