Kobach, K
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SEE TWO
MERRI OK
SEE VOTER SUPPRESSION
see bak (why mult?) 4 26 I THINK ALL MAIN IS IN TWO AND BETTER FORMAT
rww Tags: Kris Kobach Sean Feucht Christian Nationalism
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AN 4 25
Being a Republican in Kansas means[
Not really. Sure, you might have to mumble a half-hearted apology or lose an election here or there. But don’t worry! You won’t face any sanctions with teeth or be out of office for long. Kansas Republicans embrace affirmative action for middle-aged, mediocre white men who believe the right things.
Take Rep. Nick Nick Hoheisel, R-Wichita. Back in February, he found himself in a bit of a jam after confronting with Rep. Ford Carr, D-Wichita, on the House floor. Hoheisel, who is white, confronted Carr, who is Black, over Carr’s rhetoric. According to witnesses, the Republican used profanity. Carr later filed a formal complaint.
In our original coverage of events, Hoheisel appeared to deny that anything untoward had occurred.
“I’m not going to dignify any of those false and outlandish allegations with a response,” Hoheisel wrote editor Sherman Smith in a text message.
Yet Hoheisel eventually apologized to the House, while still claiming the allegation were “significantly overstated.”
A special committee made up of three Republicans and three Democrats looked into the complaint and deadlocked. Republican leaders lowered the boom on Carr, however, and subjected him to a multi-day ordeal before that same committee. His main sin appears to have been calling the GOP racist. The panel will potentially send a letter to the full House admonishing Carr.
Hoheisel escaped any discipline whatsoever.
That’s just for Democrats or saps.
Conservatives don’t pay a price for cursing at their opponents, losing high-profile races or an array of other bad behavior. Not in Kansas, they don’t.
State Sen. Virgil Peck once joked about shooting immigrants from helicopters. Then a representative, he issued a brief apology and kept serving. Eventually, he lost a primary for state Senate. But he worked his way into the chamber eventually, spreading nonsense about chivalrous manhood along the way.
Just this session, he criticized journalists’ “inaccurate” stories to justify raising the rent of press offices at the Statehouse.
Rep. Pat Proctor has left a trail of bellicosity and startling rhetoric about Kansas elections. Yet he’s now running to administer those same elections as secretary of state. A previous contender for that office, Mike Brown, failed in his 2022 bid to unseat elections chief Scott Schwab. Yet Brown simply pivoted to run for state GOP chairman the very next year — and won.
Senate President Ty Masterson went through bankruptcy and somehow found a six-figure job at Wichita State University to complement his legislative work. Nice work if you can get it, right? He’s likely to launch a gubernatorial bid soon.
The one and only Kris Kobach lost consecutive statewide elections to Gov. Laura Kelly in 2018 and Sen. Roger Marshall in 2020. He finally managed to claw his way back to relevancy through a successful bid for attorney general. Who knows where he might land next, but he clearly wasn’t daunted by Kansas voters’ repeated rejections. They don’t know what a good deal they have in voting for another subpar white man.
As I said, white male Republicans of a conservative bent can rest assured in their continued relevance, no matter controversies or losses.
The one person who appears to have paid a price for his shortcomings is House Majority Leader Gene Suellentrop, who was jailed on a drunk driving charge and ousted from his post in 2021. He stayed around the Statehouse through early 2023, though. Statehouse leaders didn’t want to look like they were too tough on the poor fellow, I suppose.
This year, we’ve heard repeatedly from those in Washington, D.C., that efforts to embrace diversity, equity and inclusion have gone too far.
We’ve heard repeated suggestions that prominent and accomplished Black people, women and LGBTQ+ community members don’t have what it takes. Marshall even suggested that DEI policies contributed to the crash of a passenger plane from Wichita.
Yet those in Topeka have shown us throughout recent years that the real threat doesn’t come from Black people, women or LGBTQ+ folks.
It comes from doughy white men who won’t take a hint to leave the rest of us alone.
*Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary,here.
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.
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THOM AN 10 24
— Republican attorneys general go to court to demand more pregnant 15-year-olds. This story sounds too bizarre to be true, but Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Kansas Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Idaho Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador have filed a lawsuit in federal court — presumably aiming for an eventual hearing before the Supreme Court — claiming that their states are being harmed, population-wise, by the availability of abortion drugs that can be shipped into their states by mail.
They want shipping Mifepristone outlawed nationwide. The proof of the harm, they say, is that they are not seeing enough pregnant teenagers. The lawsuit is explicit (page 190): “Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself. … When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly ‘do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,’ even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that ‘women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.’”
They then claim that this “proof” that availability of mailed abortion pills are causing the drop in pregnancies among girls 15-19 years old is an “injury” to their states because it lowers their potential population. This is getting wild, but wait until the Supreme Court authorizes Red states to begin monitoring the menstrual periods of fertile girls and women; Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt has already introduced federal legislation requiring companies selling devices that track ovulation to report their results to state agencies or a federal database, including police agencies nationwide, so pregnancies can be caught and tracked. Republicans won’t be happy until every girl in America grows up the way Amy Coney Barrett did in her People of Praise Catholic cult where she was referred to as a “Handmaiden.”
— And now, to the delight of Republican lawmakers and police the US government has bought a tool that can track you by your cellphone to abortion clinics anywhere in the country. Locate X is a product from Babel Street which our government has been using since the Trump administration; it’s capable of tracking every cellphone in the country with remarkable location accuracy. The folks at 404 Media did a trial run of it focused on tracking people to and from abortion clinics, and the process was startlingly easy. When Ted Cruz, JD Vance, and the rest of the GOP forced-birth crowd again gain control of the federal government, get ready. They’re chomping at the bit…...
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sept 2018
Republican Kris Kobach on Monday turned to a mysterious former special assistant to President Donald Trump to help him remain on the ballot in the governor's race.
In a brief appearance by phone at Monday's Objections Board hearing, Mike Roman defended Kobach [koch spook] againstefforts by liberal activist Davis Hammet to knock the secretary of state off the ballot, partly over questions about mail-in votes that weren't counted because of mismatched signatures.
Roman, whom the Kobach campaign hired when it thought it might face a recount in the primary, generated . . .
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rww 4 23
Tags: Doug Blex Jason Goetz Ken Rahjes Kevin Stitt Kris Kobach Rick Kloos Sean Feucht Tracey Mann Virgil Peck Christian Nationalism
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/christian-nationalist-sean-feucht-prayed-over-multiple-elected-officials-nothing-can-stop-the-kingdom-of-god/
no lnx vid
Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht Prayed Over Multiple Elected Officials: ‘Nothing Can Stop the Kingdom of God’
Kyle MantylaBy Kyle Mantyla | April 26, 2023 3:12 pm
Christian musician turned right-wing political activist Sean Feucht made a stop at MAGA pastor Jackson Lahmeyer’s church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last Thursday, where he proudly declared himself a Christian nationalist.
Christian nationalists believe the U.S. and state governments should operate and legislate according to their interpretation of the Bible, and that only Christians who share their political and religious worldview should control the reins of power. While many right-wing activists seek to downplay or obfuscate their Christian nationalist agenda, Feucht was very open about his intentions.
“We want God to be in control of everything,” he declared. “We want believers to be the ones writing the laws. Yes. Guilty as charged.”
Feucht was in Oklahoma last week because it was the latest stop on the“Kingdom to the Capitol” tour,a joint project he launched with right-wing youth organization Turning Point USA to bring Feucht’s mix of worship and hard-right politics to every state capitol in the nation.
Last Friday, Feucht and his “Kingdom to the Capitol” tour set up shop on the grounds of the Oklahoma capitol, where Feucht was welcomed by Gov. Kevin Stitt, who last year dedicated “every square inch” of the state to Jesus.
Following brief remarks from Stitt, Feucht laid hands upon the governor and led the audience in praying over him.
“This is so biblical, and it’s so appropriate for us to come as the people of God and release a blessing over this building, over this man, over the government,” Feucht proclaimed. “This is really Davidic what we’re doing here, it’s like David bringing an offering to the Lord at the most important governmental building in the state, and we’re just so honored to have the governor here with us.”
“Lord, we just thank you for this man of God,” Feucht continued. “We thank you for the state of Oklahoma. God, we thank you for what you’re doing here. We thank you, God, how you’re raising up this state to be a model state for America. God, we thank you that you’ve put a mantle of leadership on Gov. Kevin and you put a mantle of leadership on the legislature of this state. God, we need godly leaders in America, and we thank you that you have them in Oklahoma. Lord, we pray God that you would take the pattern of what you’re doing here and that you would duplicate it across the land.”
Two days later, Feucht and his tour stopped at the capitol in Topeka, Kansas, where multiple members of the state legislature, Rep. Tracey Mann, and far-right state Attorney General Kris Kobach all prayed and were then prayed over by Feucht in return.
“No longer can the church afford to vacate the political realm,” Feucht declared. “Lord, we thank you, God, that you have raised up men and women to stand as watchmen on the wall for the state of Kansas. Lord, we commit as the Church of Jesus Christ to pray for them. Lord, we thank you that you’ve put them in positions of authority. … We just declare over this capitol building: Nothing can stop the kingdom of God. Nothing can stop the plans of God.”
Among the Kansas legislators who appeared on stage with Feucht were state Reps. Doug Blex, Jason Goetz, and Ken Rahjes, and state Sens. Virgil Peck and Rick Kloos.
Tags: Doug Blex Jason Goetz Ken Rahjes Kevin Stitt Kris Kobach Rick Kloos Sean Feucht Tracey Mann Virgil Peck Christian Nationalism
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2 pled guilty, kkk broke finance law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Build_the_Wall
we Build the Wall is an organization soliciting donations to build private sections of the wall along the Mexico–U.S. border. It started as a GoFundMe campaign by United States Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage in December 2018.[2] Kolfage announced the formation of a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization in January 2019.[3] By mid-2020, over $25 million had been raised[4][5] and a 3-mile (4.8 km) section of fence had been built.[6]
Its advisory board includes politicians and activists with a hard-line stance on illegal immigration, including former secretary of state of Kansas Kris Kobach;[7] former congressman Tom Tancredo;[8]Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince; former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke;[9] and former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon,[5][10] who is chairman of the board.[11] On December 3, 2019, a Hidalgo County judge ordered the group to temporarily halt all construction due to its plans to build adjacent to the Rio Grande, which a lawyer for the National Butterfly Center argued would create a flooding risk. On January 9, 2020, a federal judge lifted the injunction, allowing construction to resume....
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-says-he-didnt-approve-of-border-wall-project-but-these-key-players-bragged-of-his-approval
After Steve Bannon’s arrest on Thursday, Donald Trump tried to put a Grand Canyon-sized gap between himself and the “We Build The Wall” border scheme. Bannon, Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato, and Timothy Shea were indicted on counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The federal indictment says the crew pilfered “hundreds of thousands of dollars” and a Bannon-controlled nonprofit received more than $1 million in funds.
The federal government is seeking to take possession of the fraudulently purchased items, like the flashy boat Kolfage purchased and used in recent “Trumptilla” boat parades. Incredibly enough, Bannon and Kolfage recorded a video promoting their scam fund and folks, you are not going to believe this—Bannon actually jokes they are filming in Saint-Tropez in southern France before adding: “We are on the million dollar yacht of Brian Kolfage. Brian Kolfage, he took all that money from Build The Wall.” Kolfage then lets out an awkward laugh. Watch them joke about the fraud below. You cannot make this up.
[twt mma] after you collect yourself, watch the video below this because it just keeps getting better. First up, let’s revisit Trump’s statement trying to put daylight between himself and the We Build The Wall project. He repeatedly says he “didn’t like it” and thought it was “showboating and maybe looking for funds.” In a stumbling response, he repeatedly said he never approved of the project and Bannon aside, that he didn’t know anyone involved. As you’ll see below, most of the folks involved in the project said otherwise.
Let’s listen to former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has been described as a “racist traveling con man” because of his history of helping cities enact racist laws and then billing them to represent them in court cases they inevitably lose.
[vid: t i feel bad about bannon charges]
kobach is legal counsel for We Build The Wall, because of course he is, and he recorded an “interview” with Jennifer Lawrence, who is also listed on the We Build The Wall website as the communications director for the organization. Listen to Kobach describe his conversation with Donald Trump and brag that Trump said: “I want the media to know this project has my blessing.”
It should be noted that just before Bannon’s arrest on Thursday morning byfederal postal inspectors on a yacht off the coast of Connecticut, federal investigators were also serving a warrant on Lawrence and another associate, Dustin Stockton. The pair told CNN that “heavily armed federal agents” served the warrant and confiscated their cell phones.
No doubt, Kobach must be sweating. Going after lower-level employees is a sure sign they’re angling for bigger fish. And while Kobach bragged about Trump’s full-throated approval, he wasn’t alone. Lexi Churchill of ProPublica found other examples claiming Trump’s full endorsement. Amanda Shea, wife of the recently indicted Timothy Shea, shared a photo of the crew with Donald Trump in August 2019, with a caption saying: “A summer of winning came to a high note in the Hamptons. I had the absolute pleasure and honor of spending time with President Trump who had a lot of questions about the wall We The People built through We Build The Wall. He was impressed, but more importantly, incredibly personable and easy to talk to. I forgot that I was speaking with one of the most powerful men in the world.”
Shea also touted the meeting on Twitter.
Churchill also found an interview Kolfage did with The Gateway Pundit in which Kolfage bragged of Trump’s support, saying: “President Trump loves what we are doing.”
And wherever a right-wing grift exists, you knowJunior isn’t far behind. Of course he promoted the wall and congratulated Kolfage on “[t]his is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else. What you guys are doing is amazing.”
Trump’s Acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf, who a federal court ruled is illegally serving in the role, called the group’s work a “game changer” and said he “welcomed” their efforts.
So it would seem this is another in a long list of lies from Donald Trump. He welcomed this group’s efforts right up until ProPublica reported on the shoddy construction of the privately built wall, which was in danger of falling over. Nevertheless, the contractor, Fisher Industries, was awarded a massive government contract to build Trump’s wall and Trump reportedly “personally and repeatedly” intervened to make sure Fisher was awarded the project.
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here’s what Kris Kobach reveals about the nature of the modern GOP
Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 12, 2020
Last Tuesday, Kansas held its Republican senate primary—a race that I suggested was the most bizarre of the season. In the end, the so-called “establishment” breathed a sign of relief that Kris…
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omfg (in an vox art on erik prince of darkness)
...In the months since that fundraiser, Thiel has pumped $850,000 into a super PAC behind Kobach— and that could be just the start if he wins. The investment in Kobach is Thiel’s most significant political bet since he risked his standing in Silicon Valley to support Donald Trump in 2016. And the wisdom of that bet will be tested just next week, when Kobach faces the voters of Kansas in a race that polls show to be tight.
If Kobach is elected, it could give Thiel a loyal ally in the Senate because of how powerful he is proving to be in the race. That alliance becomes all the more key if Trump loses this fall, which would weaken the Washington influence of Thiel, a board member at Facebook and a founder of Palantir, which has deep ties to the government....
But part of their alliance can be explained by more personal reasons. A key lubricant binding Thiel to his new candidate is Ann Coulter, the conservative provocateur who last week called Democrats the “antifa party.” She is close with Thiel, and is a Kobach super-fan.
Asked by Recode why she thought Thiel and Kobach felt such a kinship, Coulter took a dig at the GOP establishment and offered that “it might have something to do with Kobach having twice the I.Q. of Mitch McConnell.”
Coulter and Thiel have been fellow rabble-rousers in the conservative movement since at least 2010, when Thiel introduced her to speak to “Homocon,” a conference for gay conservatives held at his apartment. Coulter would even dedicate one of her books to him the following year. The two remain close, attending Hollywood parties together.
It was Coulter who co-hosted that Kobach fundraiser at Thiel’s apartment last fall, an event that brought Kobach before wealthy people like GOP power broker Rebekah Mercer andErik Prince, the founder of the military contracting firm Blackwater.
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/first-sessions-now-kobach-america-first-candidates-are-flopping-at-the-voting-booth/
Far-right anti-immigration hardliner Kris Kobach lost the Kansas Republican Senate primary to Rep. Roger Marshall by more than 50,000 votes, marking the latest defeat for far-right “America First” candidates at the ballot box.
In 2020, several high-profile Republican candidates championed by far-right and white nationalist political activists have been rejected by their constituencies. Right Wing Watch reported in January that white nationalists were excited by the prospect of Kobach, the former secretary of state of Kansas, serving in the Senate. White nationalist podcaster James Allsup told listeners at the time that “having somebody like Kobach in the upper house, in a position of power, as an anti-immigration, as an immigration restrictionist leader, that would be immensely powerful going forward.”
On Tuesday night the race was called, and the far-right activists who had supported Kobach’s bid mourned his electoral loss online. Many “America First” white nationalist movement figures blamed the GOP for Kobach’s defeat.
“Back to the hills. Of course, we’ve been there before,” Peter Brimelow, editor of the anti-immigrant, white nationalist publication VDARE, said. He added that it was “annoying” that far-right commentator Ann Coulter was right about President Donald Trump. Coulter, once an avid supporter of Trump, has attacked the president in recent years and called Trump the “most disloyal actual retard” after he endorsed former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Republican primary opponent Tommy Tuberville in Alabama.
“Fuck the weak Kansas Republicans who are looking at this primary as a ‘victory.’ No matter what you’re electing a member of the monoparty in November who hates you and will continue to sell you out to our globalist elites,” far-right Kansas State student Jaden McNeil said. “Enjoy your state’s continued degradation.”
Scott Greer, a former editor at The Daily Caller who was revealed to be writing alt-right columns under a pseudonym, only offered one comment on Kobach’s loss: “Damn.”
White nationalist and alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer theorized that Kobach’s loss reflected the unpopularity of “conservative nationalism.” Spencer has been vocal in his disdain for the elements of the far-right that overtook him in popularity and the flaws he sees in those ranks.
“Steve King . . . Jeff Sessions . . . Kris Kobach . . . then Donald Trump in November . . . The’America First’ conservatives and supposed ‘immigration hawks’ are falling like dominos,” Spencer tweeted. He later added, “You can blame Trump’s tactical failures—and there are many—you can blame Jared and Ivanka, etc. At some point you must conclude that conservative nationalism isn’t going anywhere, and it’s simply not very popular.”
Joshua Foxworth, a Republican “America First” candidate in Texas who was trumped by incumbent Rep. Randy Weber in a blow-out loss in March, blamed Kobach’s loss on the media.
“The loss of Kobach in Kansas is upsetting but not surprising,” Foxworth said. “Almost no one can overcome a media that constantly promotes or opposes a candidate. Deplatforming of supporters doesn’t help. The GOP is in danger of becoming a party without core issues and without a base.”
But Kobach’s loss does not exist in a vacuum. Other far-right supported candidates, like Sessions, Iowa Rep. Steve King, and Arizona former sheriff Joe Arpaio have seen their hopes for high office dashed.
Sessions’ campaign attempted to earn the support of far-right and anti-immigration voters, going so far as to tap far-right columnist Michelle Malkin to author a fundraising letter in May. Malkin made the play obvious, opening the letter by calling Sessions “an old friend of the America First movement.” But President Donald Trump, nursing a grudge against Sessions for recusing himself from the probe of Russian influence in the 2016 election, urged Republican voters to reject Sessions. Last month, Sessions lost Alabama’s Republican runoff election to Tuberville by more than 100,000 votes.
King, who has a sordid history of racist remarks during his nine terms serving in the U.S. House, lost the Iowa Republican primary to Randy Feenstra by nearly 10 percentage points.
And in Arizona, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is facing a close contest against challenger Jerry Sheridan in a race to get his old job back after receiving a pardon from Trump in 2017. (Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt in going after undocumented immigrants.) With 90 of 99 vote centers counted at the time of publication, Sheridan is shown slightly ahead. Arpaio has not yet conceded the race.
William Gheen, president of the anti-immigrant Americans for Legal Immigration PAC mourned the loss of Sessions, Arpaio, Kobach, and King.
“All four of America’s top illegal immigration fighters have fallen. Farewell Joe Arpaio, Kris Kobach, Jeff Sessions, and Rep. Steve King,” Gheen said. “ Who would have ever guessed after four years of Trump our top voices against illegal immigration would [be] gone.”
“America First is inevitable,” white nationalist and anti-Semitic podcaster Nick Fuentes declared on July 7.
It would seem that it’s actually anything but.
However, these far-right losses at the ballot box are not indicators that extremism in the Republican Party is retreating, rather the opposite appears to be true. For certain far-right causes—like the “America First” movement—the defeats may prompt an exploration of options beyond electoral politics. And while extremists gaining legislative power can have disastrous consequences for a democracy, history has shown that extremists seeking solutions outside of the political system can also prove to be dangerous.
Tags: Jeff Sessions Joe Arpaio Kris Kobach Nick Fuentes Peter Brimelow Scott Greer Steve King Alt-Right anti-immigrant white nationalism VDARE
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/gop-strategists-fear-a-kris-kobach-nomination-could-cost-republicans-greatly-the-senate-majority-runs-through-kansas/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/here-are-13-ways-a-democratic-wave-pickup-of-double-digit-senate-seats-is-a-real-possibility/
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Kansas Senate seat in play as Republicans look to re-nominate perpetual loser Kris Kobach
an 620
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/with-pompeo-out-of-the-running-white-nationalists-dream-of-a-kansas-senator-kris-kobach/
With Secretary of State Mike Pompeo out of the picture, Kris Kobach, the Republican former secretary of state of Kansas and an anti-immigration hardliner, has a better chance at winning the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate this year, and that has some white nationalists excited.
Pompeo has reportedly decided not to run for Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts’ soon-to-be-vacant seat. According to Politico, some GOP officials worry that Pompeo’s decision to remain Secretary of State will provide Kobach with a better chance at securing the Republican nomination for the seat, and that Kobach might then lose the election to a Democratic opponent in the general election as he did in the state’s 2018 gubernatorial race.Opponents of Kobach have attacked him for his connections to racists and white nationalists, who applaud Kobach’s support of anti-immigrant policies. The white nationalist website VDARE called Pompeo’s announcement “one domestic upside from the tensions with Iran.”
On a podcast uploaded Sunday, co-host of the racist podcast “Fash the Nation” James Allsup and a host appearing under the moniker “Ethnarch” interpreted Pompeo’s decision not to run as a glimmer of hope for Kobach’s candidacy, but they worried that the GOP would abandon Kobach if he secured the Republican nomination in his primary. “Fash the Nation” is hosted on the alt-right podcast network The Right Stuff, which is helmed by white nationalist Mike “Enoch” Peinovich.
“It benefits us, and it benefits the American people, because if he actually does end up being nominated and ends up being elected to the Senate—somebody who actually does have the interest of the people, the actual people, of the United States at heart in terms of dealing with immigration—and if [Republicans] tank, then it just demonstrates in an undeniable way that our narratives on this are correct and that these people will do anything—anything—to avoid even the possibility of making things better for us legacy white Americans,” Ethnarch said.
“Yeah, the GOP—all about winning these seats—would rather throw the election, would rather allow a Democrat to take the Senate seat then assist someone like Kobach, someone with Kobach’s politics in taking that, in winning that seat. It’s a very winnable election, of course. Kansas is one of these states, it’s very typically deep red. It’s a seat that Republicans have held for many years, and we already see the NRSC—National Republican Senatorial Committee—positioning themselves, putting themselves in a place where they’re indicating they’re not going to be involved with Kobach, even if he does become the nominee. They would rather throw this race than assist him in the victory,” Allsup said.
“And the important thing about this election, too, is that being a 2020 Senate election, he would not be up for election again until 2026. And no matter what happened to Trump, or what happens to Trump in 2020, if Kobach is to win this seat, he’s going to be in office longer than Trump is. With everything we know has happened in the Trump administration and their position on immigration, the total cave that we’ve witnessed and covered in real-time, having somebody like Kobach in the upper house, in a position of power, as an anti-immigration, as an immigration restrictionist leader, that would be immensely powerful going forward,” Allsup said. “And Kobach is someone who we believe to be—this is just based on what we’ve seen in the media and what we’ve read—we get the impression that he is someone who is ideologically motivated and he is someone who is not going to be swayed at the flip of a coin like Trump is on immigration.”
“Having someone like him as a senator, that would be extremely powerful,” Allsup said.
Kobach has long supported Trump. He joined Trump’s presidential transition team as an immigration adviser in 2016, and Trump’s team even considered him for Homeland Security Secretary. In leaked Trump transition vetting docs reported by Axios last year, Republican National Committee researchers flagged Kobach for vulnerabilities regarding “white supremacy” while he was being considered for the post. RWW’s Miranda Blue noted when Kobach joined the transition team:
Kobach, like Trump, has been known to be drawn to conspiracy theories, especially ones that bolster fears of the growing influence of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. On his weekly radio show in 2014, Kobach entertained the question of a listener who wondered if a Hispanic majority in the U.S. would start conducting “ethnic cleansing,” saying that while he thought it was unlikely, “things are strange and they are happening” under President Obama. On another occasion, he told a caller it would not be a “huge jump” to think that the president might ban all criminal prosecutions of African Americans. Just this year, Kobach told a caller to his show that Obama might well oppose Kobach’s disastrous proof-of-citizenship voting restriction in Kansas because he’s not a citizen himself.
After Kobach won Kansas’ gubernatorial primary in 2018, RWW’s Peter Montgomery noted:
Kobach has been equally zealous in promoting his anti-immigration views, not surprising for someone who worked for Immigration Reform Law Institute, a legal affiliate of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, one of the anti-immigration groups founded by promoter of white nationalist ideology John Tanton that was designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2015, Kobach spoke at a writers workshop event held by the Social Contract Press, which frequently publishes the work of white nationalists.
For these reasons, Kobach offers hope to some white nationalists that their anti-immigrant policy agenda could be championed in Congress.
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an 1119
...All of this has renewed the on-again, off-again speculation that Pompeo may be planning to run for Senate in 2020, as Sen. Pat Roberts is retiring — something that he has vehemently denied he is doing.
It is widely expected that if Pompeo were to run for Senate, he would lock the seat down, as he remains popular there and Republicans have not lost a Kansas Senate race since 1932.
But if he isn’t, many political figures note, then he is wasting everyone’s time and money. The Kansas City Star ran an editorial saying Pompeo has “better things to do” than repeatedly fly to Kansas, and he “should quit his rather important day job” if he’s really flirting with a run, and Senate Democrats have filed a complaint asking watchdogs to look into his Kansas trips.
Even without Pompeo speculation, the Kansas Senate race is already shaping up to be far more interesting than usual with Roberts stepping aside. Congressman Roger Marshall appears to be the pick of GOP leadership, but flamboyant former Trump ally andanti-voting-rights crusader Kris Kobach is also running fresh off his failed bid for governor.Meanwhile, Democrats have a star recruit in state Sen. Barbara Bollier, who was until recently a Republican before defecting over the party’s extremism.
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Kobach files for Kansas Senate run in blow to GOP groups
Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach launched a run for U.S. Senate in Kansas Monday. Kobach will likely face opposition from GOP-aligned outside groups in the Republican primary race for the seat held by retiring Sen. Pat Roberts. Read More
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Kansas gubernatorial election was never supposed to be a toss-up race for Republicans.
While the GOP brand in the state was badly damaged by the administration of Sam Brownback, whose cuts to taxes and public services put the state into financial disaster, Republicans outnumber Democrats in Kansas two to one, and the state went for both Mitt Romney and Donald Trump by over 20 points. It is a quintessential GOP stronghold — and the presence of independent Greg Orman in the race was supposed to pull even more votes from Democrats.
So how, exactly, did right-wing superstar Kris Kobach lose to Democratic state Sen. Laura Kelly on Tuesday?
According to the Kansas City Star, a number of Republican operatives in the state put the blame squarely on Kobach's own arrogance and incompetence. He thought he was a shoo-in, and consequently spent more time showboating for the base than actually doing campaign work:
Kobach's campaign was marked by his parade appearances on a jeep with a mounted replica machine gun, a rally with rocker Ted Nugent and his fiery debate performances where he derisively compared suburban public school buildings to the Taj Mahal.
But behind the scenes is where the circus really took place.
Interviews with more than a dozen Republican strategists and officials paint a picture of a candidate who refused to listen to advice, was unwilling to put energy into fundraising and failed to set up a basic "get out the vote" operation.
Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, struggled to pay his campaign staff on time and at one point lacked a working phone system at his Johnson County campaign office, according to GOP sources familiar with the campaign. And people who offered to volunteer were never contacted.
"It was the most dysfunctional thing I've ever seen in my life," said a long-time GOP operative in Kansas.
Kobach, it should be noted, also had plenty of baggage that went well beyond his unwillingness to invest in his campaign.
As secretary of state, he was one of the nation's most aggressive crusaders against voting rights, running a shady voter fraud commission for Trump, deploying his own personal team of prosecutors to charge people with voter fraud over innocent mistakes, creating an interstate voter registration-pruning system that jeopardized voters' personal information, and championing a "proof-of-citizenship" voter registration law that disenfranchised 36,000 peoplewithout even giving them notice. In fact, Kobach's restrictions on voting were so severe that federal judges ruled them illegal, and he ended up found in contempt of court and ordered to take remedial law classes after trying to defend these laws.
But in the end, it is clear that voter suppression was not enough to rescue Kobach. He failed to read the political climate and took his position for granted — and he paid the price for it.
==
kobach917
ding dong 1/18 but...
declared himself of trans team, walked back by trump ppl to cya?
he's back b/c supports bs on hillary voter fraud popular vote
trump must have evidence for loss of pop vote
==
dingdong2 pension plan? will go down with djt?
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-ally-and-voter-suppression-guru-kris-kobach-goes-down-flames-democrat-laura
Kobach has led the fight for voter suppression measures like voter ID laws, which restrict access to the ballot. At the same time, he consistently opposes measures designed to increase voter turnout such as early voting and automatic registration.
With the governorship in hand, Kelly, a member of the state senate, will have the ability to affect the states redistricting after the 2020 census. Had Kobach been in charge, it would have been a foregone conclusion that the state would be heavily gerrymandered to ensure as much GOP control as possible. Kelly gives the state's residents a fighting chance at fairly drawn districts.
==
Kkk
Secretary of State, Breitbart columnist, and Fox News favorite Kris Kobach has been a big proponent of the voter fraud hoax. He even led Trump's voter suppression panel. He had championed his state's voter registration law and even personally defended it in court, earning laudits from white supremacists. Now, a federal judge has struck down the law -- and ordered Kobach to take remedial classes after he repeatedly violated the judge's orders during the trial. Kobach complained about the ruling on Fox & Friends.
==
https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/trumps-vote-suppression-team-doing-gops-dirty-work
Anyone who favors expanding voting rights should be relieved by Wednesday’s demise of President Trump’s so-called Election Integrity Commission.But the panel’s right-wing agenda to rig the voting process to benefit the GOP will continue.
There’s plenty to cheer about when white nationalists like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice-chair, and voter suppressors like the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky were discredited by a panel run in a secretive, conspiratorial and clownish manner. But these Republicans are not giving up on their plan to create new barriers to eligible voters.
“Amid many challenges for the institutions of American democracy, this was a rousing win,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. “No doubt, there is fallout to come… The commission has vanished, but its pernicious objectives persist. The White House has asked the Department of Homeland Security to take up the commission’s work—a dangerous and appalling idea. Earlier this morning, the president took to Twitter to renew calls for voting restrictions.”
Indeed, Kobach signaled his next move to Politico, which noted, “The Kansas official said he expects officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and political appointees overseeing that agency to take over the commission’s work and begin efforts to match state voter rolls to federal databases of noncitizens. He insisted he was not disappointed with the president’s decision.”
“It’s the right move,” Kobach said. “It’s a shifting in tactics from having the investigation be done by a federal commission to having it be done by a federal agency. The agency has a greater ability to move quickly to get the investigation done.”
The GOP Strategy Unmasked
Kobach’s is referring to a strategy employed by the most fervent partisan Republicans to position red-run states to keep new registrants from voting and do mass purges of infrequent but otherwise legal voters from their rolls. In short, it draws on intentionally sloppy data-mining to creates thousands of false positives that are then used to stymie voters. That porous data has been used in recent cycles in Georgia to delay approving new registrations and to accelerate mass purges of voter rolls. But it's not just Georgia.
In 2014, Florida’s top election official proposed using DHS’s problematic citizenship data to purge voter rolls. In response, county election supervisors rebelled and blocked it—because they still felt the sting of the 2000 election, when Secretary of State Katherine Harris used sloppy data-mining (seeking former felons who could not vote under that state's laws) to purge tens of thousands of eligible voters before that year's presidential election.
If Kobach has his way, the contours of that sordid history will repeat itself, including using a DHS database that was never designed to be an authoritative list of every U.S. citizen. But in the years since Harris’ Florida purge, the right-wing strategy has become clear.
Republicans like Kobach strategically target weak points in the voting process. They pinpoint areas in the process that are ambiguous, or where there’s no authoritative national data to counter their claims of purported illegal activity.
For example, there is no federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, which these right-wingers define as someone impersonating someone else at the polls to vote more than once, and has become the go-to justificatiom for red-run states to erect new barriers to voting century. Since there’s no single federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, it becomes a useful propaganda tool for Republicans because it's left to acacdemics and the media to debunk it, which these partisans routinely ignore.
The latest high-profile example of this narrative is Trump's thoroughly debunked claim that millions of Democrats illegally voted more than once to deprive him of 2016’s popular vote majority.But that lie, recited again by Trump’s press office when announcing the commission’s demise, resonates among supporters who want to believe all Democrats are crooks despite vast documentation by academics and the press that voter fraud barely exists. In the absence of an authoritative federal accounting, it becomes an easy pretext for red states to pass laws to, as they purport, police the process’ integrity. In reality, they thwart Democratic voters.
Not surprisingly, on Thursday, Kobach spewed that same line to—where else?—Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. “They [Democrats] have absolutely no interest in stopping voter fraud,” Kobach told Breitbart. “It’s truly extraordinary that one party in our system has made clear that they don’t care… Some people on the Left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”
What's wrong with these figures? Beyond the fact that some of these numbers, like his Kansas statistics, have been debunked, what’s missing is the context or the larger number, the denominator if you will: that is, how many people voted legally in all the years cited? In other words, how pervasive is this problem? What is its real magnitude in the real world of voting?Kobach, pretending to be authoritative, then cited figures that also have been pedaled by the Heritage Foundation's von Spakovsky. “The voter fraud commission has revealed: 938 convictions for voter fraud since the year 2000,” he said. “Fewer than 1 in 100 cases ends in a conviction. In Kansas, alone, there are 127 known cases of non-citizen aliens registering to vote. In 21 states, there were 8,471 cases of double voting discovered.”
The answer is it is a trifle. That's because that well over half a billion people have voted in federal elections alone since 2000, which means the 938 figure is close to a once-in-a-million occurrence. Nonetheless, the absence of an authoritative federal agency tracking this activity and issuing authoritative reports that are respected by legislatures and the courts, perpetuates Kobach’s propaganda. Its absence continues to serve as a red-state pretext to overly police voting—as seen in Trump’s Thursday tweets.
Kobach Wants ICE to Vet New Voters?
That fabricated backdrop for imposing new restrictions on voting takes us to what’s new and potentially insidious about Kobach’s latest gambit. He wants the Department of Homeland Security to take responsibility for preventing “non-citizen aliens” from voting. Just like voter fraud, there is no authoritative federal database—even at DHS—listing every American citizen. Their database is designed to ensure welfare recipients are entitles to their benefits; but it is not a list of every U.S. citizen.
That deficiency creates an opening which right-wingers like Kobach, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner have sought to exploit—and have exploited—to game the process of voting to up the GOP’s chances of winning. Because DHS’s citizenship database is incomplete, it cannot confirm the citizenship of every new person registering to vote. That omission was exploited by Kemp to delay processing tens of thousands of new voter registrations in 2014. After that November, almost all of those registrations were approved; but not for the election those Georgians wanted to vote in.
When Detzner tried to force Florida county election offices to use DHS’s citizenship data to purge voter rolls—initially claiming, like Kobach, that there were hundreds of thousands of illegally registered voters—local officials balked and forced him to back down. Later, it was revealed that there were fewer than 100 questionable registrants among Florida's 10 million-plus registered voters.
Why would Republicans focus on proof of citizenship in order to vote? Because, as the Brennan Center reported in 2006 and updated in a report last summer, an estimated 7 percent of eligible voters don’t have such documentation, typically a birth certificate or passport. In other words, adding proof of citizenship to register will reduce participation in elections. (Think of it as a barrier at the starting line of the process, just as stricter state voter ID requirements is a barrier at the finish line.)
“A nationwide survey by the Brennan Center in November 2006 found that 7 percent of the citizen voting age population, or 13 million people, did not possess documents that would prove their citizenship,” the Center’s July 2017 reportsaid. “The rate is twice as high among citizens earning less than $25,000 per year. Women who changed their name upon getting married are especially likely to lack the relevant documents: A third of voting-age women don’t have proof of citizenship that reflects their current name.”
In other words, making proof of citizenship a new requirement before getting a ballot will mostly hurt likely Democrats.
Bad Data as a Partisan Tool
Republicans also know that the use of incomplete citizenship data can be used to stymie voters on Election Day. That's because it is a tool to do pre-emptive voter roll purges, in which inactive voters, especially in blue epicenters, can be disproportionately purged or removed from voting in the next election without reregistering.
That’s not a paranoid scenario. The Supreme Court will later this month hear a case over that very issue from Ohio, where GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted took advantage of two contradictory sentences in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to purge tens of thousands of mostly Democratic voters from his state’s three biggest cities. Reuters' reporters analyzed the purge and found it was mostly aimed at Democrats. Here again, the GOP saw and seized on a legal ambiguity and used data to tilt the process.
The reason Kobach and Trump’s commission was so bent on adding a new proof of citizenship standard is it benefits the GOP in many ways. First, as the Brennan Center noted, 7 percent of otherwise eligible voters don’t have the paper documentation.(Today people sign their name on registration forms as an oath under penalty of perjury; these Republicans say that's not good enough.) Beyond that, knowingly turning to sloppy data-mining to additionally delay new registrants further helps the GOP by thwarting grassroots registration drives. And using bad data to imprecisely target infrequent voters for selective purges also helps them.
The Voting Wars Continue
It’s a good thing that media scrutiny and public criticism of Trump’s election commission shut down that sham panel. But it was only one means to an end that is still in the GOP’s sights. Indeed, just this week it was revealed thst the Justice Department asked the U.S. Census to include a question on citizenship, citing a need to use that information to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
Kobach and his ilk will do anything to subvert the process of voting for Democrats and non-whites. They’ve burrowed into the nooks and crannies of the law and process to exploit ambiguities and contradictions. Just watch what they will try to do in the months ahead—not just with baseless voter fraud accusation, but with screening for citizenship. As they wrap themselves in the flag, look at their data-mining. They know it’s shoddy and going to yield huge numbers of false positives, and that’s just what they want.
Steven Rosenfeld
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/09/08/right-wing-medias-new-voter-fraud-proof-even-more-asinine-usual/217887
Right-wing media's new voter fraud "proof" is even more asinine than usual
Research ››› September 8, 2017 3:34 PM EDT ››› ZACHARY PLEAT
Right-wing and fringe media outlets and figures, including Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Trump administration’s election integrity commission, are citing a Washington Times article about several thousand New Hampshire voters using out-of-state driver’s licenses to register to vote to bolster conservative claims of fraud and say that Republicans may have actually won the state. But journalists and election experts shot down these claims of voter fraud and explained that New Hampshire’s voter ID law permits out-of-state driver’s licenses to be used as proof of identity when voting, an option that college students often exercise.
Sarah Wasko / Media Matters
Conservative and fringe media figures: Out-of-state driver’s licenses used to vote in New Hampshire prove voter fraud against Republicans
Wash. Times used data of voters registering with out-of-state driver’s licenses in New Hampshire to promote conservative claims of voter fraud. A September 7 Washington Times article published information released by a New Hampshire Republican showing that “more than 6,500 people registered to vote in New Hampshire on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses” to bolster conservative claims of voter fraud. While admitting that these statistics “don’t prove those accusations,” the Times wrote that “they do corroborate them,” citing further data that more than 5,000 of those voters haven’t yet obtained a New Hampshire license or vehicle registration:
More than 6,500 people registered to vote in New Hampshire on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses, and since then the vast majority have neither obtained an in-state license nor registered a motor vehicle.
Conservatives say the state’s same-day registration is an invitation for fraud because of loose proof-of-residence rules.
New Hampshire House Speaker Shawn Jasper, a Republican, issued the numbers Thursday based on inquiries he made to the Department of State, which oversees elections, and the Department of Safety.
Since Election Day, Republicans have charged that a significant number of nonresident Democrats, principally from Massachusetts, flowed into New Hampshire to vote illegally, tilting a close race to their party.
“Having worked before on a campaign in New Hampshire, I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It’s very real. It’s very serious. This morning, on this show, is not the venue for me to lay out all the evidence,” White House policy adviser Stephen Miller told ABC News in February.
Though Mr. Jasper’s findings don’t prove those accusations, they do corroborate them.
[...]
New Hampshire law gives drivers 60 days upon establishing residence to obtain a state license.
But more than 80 percent of voters who registered on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses, or 5,313 of them, neither had a state license nor registered a motor vehicle almost 10 months later. [The Washington Times, 9/7/17]
Breitbart.com’s Kris Kobach cited the data in the Wash. Times article as “proof” of “fraudulent votes” in New Hampshire and claimed Hillary Clinton and Sen. Maggie Hassan may have fraudulently won the state. Kris Kobach, Kansas’ secretary of state, vice chairman of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission, and a paid Breitbart.com columnist, cited the Washington Times article as “proof” of voter fraud in New Hampshire in his September 7 column:
It has long been reported, anecdotally, that out-of-staters take advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration and head to the Granite State to cast fraudulent votes. Now there’s proof.
According to statistics released by the Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, on the date of the general election in November 2016, there were 6,540 same-day registrants who registered to vote in New Hampshire using an out-of-state driver’s license to prove their identity. In and of itself, that doesn’t prove that any fraud occurred – theoretically, each of those individuals could have been someone who recently moved to the State and had not yet had time to get a New Hampshire driver’s license. According to New Hampshire law, a new resident has 60 days to obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license.
So if those 6,540 voters were bona fide New Hampshire residents, they would get their driver’s license no later than January 7, 2017. However, the numbers tell a very different story. It turns out that, as of August 30, 2017 – nearly ten months after the election – only 1,014 of the 6,540 same-day registrants who registered with an out-of-state license had obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license. The other 5,526 individuals never obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license. And, of those 5,526, only 213 registered a vehicle in New Hampshire.
So 5,313 of those voters neither obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license nor registered a vehicle in New Hampshire. They have not followed the legal requirements for residents regarding driver’s licenses, and it appears that they are not actually residing in New Hampshire. It seems that they never were bona fide residents of the State.
5,513 is a big number – more than enough to swing two very important elections. The closest major election was the contest between incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte and challenger Maggie Hassan (D). Hassan won the election by a razor-thin margin of 1,017 votes. Those 5,313 fraudulent votes were more than enough to swing the election. If 59.2 percent or more of them went for Hassan, then the election was stolen through voter fraud. That’s likely, since the surrounding states are Democrat strongholds.
It’s also possible that New Hampshire’s four electoral college votes were swung to Hillary Clinton through illegal voting by nonresidents. Clinton won New Hampshire by only 2,732 votes. If 74.8 percent of the 5,513 fraudulent votes were cast for Clinton, then the presidential election in New Hampshire was tipped as well. [Breitbart.com, 9/7/17]
FoxNews.com: “Out-of-staters may have won New Hampshire for Clinton.” A September 8 FoxNews.com article cited the Washington Times report, saying the data it included “could potentially call into question the validity of the New Hampshire results for Nov. 8, when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton outpolled Republican nominee Donald Trump by a mere 2,736 votes.” [FoxNews.com, 9/8/17]
Gateway Pundit: “VOTE FRAUD: More Than 5,000 Out-of-State Hillary Voters May have Tipped New Hampshire Against Trump.” Right-wing fringe website Gateway Pundit cited the Washington Times story to scream “VOTE FRAUD” in the headline of a September 7 post, which claimed: “It is well known that people are bussed in to vote in New Hampshire. This is why the Democrats are fiercely working to stop any investigation into vote fraud and are working to prevent any type of voter I.D. laws. Strict laws would have tipped New Hampshire in Donald Trump’s favor.” [The Gateway Pundit, 9/7/17]
WND: “New Evidence Backs Trump Vote-Fraud Claim.” Conspiracy theory website WorldNetDaily cited the Washington Times story in a September 7 post to claim, “The discovery that more than 6,000 people used out-of-state driver’s licenses to vote in New Hampshire last November bolsters Donald Trump’s claim he lost the state because thousands of Massachusetts residents came in to vote.” [WorldNetDaily, 9/7/17]
Drudge Report: “PAPER: 5,000 out-of-state voters may have tipped NH…”
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PAPER: 5,000 out-of-state voters may have tipped NH... http://bit.ly/2xeG05E
2:15 PM - Sep 7, 2017
Photo published for More than 5,000 out-of-state voters may have tipped New Hampshire agai
More than 5,000 out-of-state voters may have tipped New Hampshire agai
More than 6,500 people registered to vote in New Hampshire on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver's licenses, and since then the vast majority have neither obtained an in-state license nor registered a m
washingtontimes.com
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Infowars’ Jerome Corsi: “MORE EVIDENCE OF DEM VOTER FRAUD.”
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ALERT: 5,000 non-resident New Hampshire presidential voters from MA cost TRUMP NH http://go.shr.lc/2wbFlgD MORE EVIDENCE OF DEM VOTER FRAUD
3:45 PM - Sep 7, 2017
Photo published for More than 5,000 out-of-state voters may have tipped New Hampshire agai
More than 5,000 out-of-state voters may have tipped New Hampshire agai
More than 6,500 people registered to vote in New Hampshire on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver's licenses, and since then the vast majority have neither obtained an in-state license nor registered a m
washingtontimes.com
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National Review’s John Fund: “Thousands of suspect out-of-state votes could have swung New Hampshire to Hillary last year.”
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Thousands of suspect out-of-state votes could have swung New Hampshire to Hillary last year. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/7/voter-fraud-alert-over-5000-new-hampshire-presiden/ …
11:38 AM - Sep 7, 2017
Photo published for More than 5,000 out-of-state voters may have tipped New Hampshire agai
More than 5,000 out-of-state voters may have tipped New Hampshire agai
More than 6,500 people registered to vote in New Hampshire on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver's licenses, and since then the vast majority have neither obtained an in-state license nor registered a m
washingtontimes.com
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Anti-immigrant hate group leader and National Review’s Mark Krikorian: “NH Senate election appears to have been stolen by @SenatorHassan with fraudulent votes.”
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NH Senate election appears to have been stolen by @SenatorHassan with fraudulent votes. http://bit.ly/2wLG6S0
9:24 PM - Sep 7, 2017
Photo published for Kobach: It Appears Out-of-State Voters Changed Outcome of New Hampshire U.S. Senate Race
Kobach: It Appears Out-of-State Voters Changed Outcome of New Hampshire U.S. Senate Race
It's long been reported anecdotally that out-of-staters take advantage of New Hampshire's same-day registration to cast fraudulent votes. Now there’s proof.
breitbart.com
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But that's not voter fraud. New Hampshire’s voter ID law permits out-of-state licenses for proof of identity, and many people never bother updating their licenses
New Hampshire voter ID law: “A driver’s license issued by any state or the federal government” will “satisfy the identification requirements” for voting. The website for New Hampshire’s secretary of state includes the text of the state’s voter ID law (accessible in PDF format), which clearly states that out-of-state driver’s licenses are acceptable forms of identification to prove a voter’s identity:
The following forms of identification bearing a photograph of the voter shall satisfy the identification requirements of paragraph I:
(1) A driver's license issued by any state or the federal government. [New Hampshire secretary of state website, accessed 9/8/17]
ACLU Voting Rights Project Director Dale Ho on Wash. Times article: “What a joke. Under NH law, someone who moves in from out of state (e.g. a college student) can vote w/ no duty to get a NH license.”
....
==
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/did-steve-bannon-and-breitbart-deploy-gop-vote-suppressor-kris-kobach-distract-new
Why did Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the national voice of the Republican’s toxic effort to hijack elections by rigging the voting process, spread out a pathetic and immediately debunked big lie about thousands of illegal voters in New Hampshire last November—an allegation that was debunked last winter by none other than Donald Trump’s first campaign manager Corey Lewandoski?
Kobach’s tirade was swiftly slapped down. The headline from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law’s blog delivered the gist: “Kobach Discovers College Students Live in College Towns.” TheWashington Post’s David Weigel tweeted, “In one hour, I found four legit NH voters whom Kobach accused of being fraudulent.” Going deeper, Philip Bump, his Post colleague, said Kobach was unfit to co-chair Trump’s presidential commission on election integrity and every media outlet knows by now he is a serial liar on this topic.
“What I’m saying is that the arguments Kobach presents about fraud in New Hampshire—and I recognize the significance of what I’m about to write—should have been too far afield even for Breitbart,” wrote Bump.
That’s the clue. Kobach’s screed was published on Breitbart News on September 7, the same day theNew York Times put online its Friday above-the-fold front-page blockbuster, “To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans: Flooding Twitter and Facebook, Imposters Helped Fuel Anger in Polarized U.S.” by Scott Shane.
Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former campaign CEO and ex-White House strategist, is back at the helm of Breitbart, where he pledged “anyone who stands in our way, we will go to war with.” It may be a coincidence that Kobach’s piece arrived on the same day as Shane’s expose. But it also may be Bannon’s propagandistic hand diverting press attention with Kobach's click-bait garbage from deepening disclosures on Russian meddling that helped Trump.
The Times report described “a cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled” that was behind 2016’s barrage of anti-Hillary Clinton content posted last year. When Bannon became Trump’s campaign CEO, he didn’t just bring a savvy understanding of online media along with white nationalist values; he brought the cutting-edge online analytics developed by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. His tools targeted voters in key states in similar ways to what the Times expose describes as Russian meddling.
Bannon is possibly using a willing Kobach to deflect attention and change the topic in a media environment that’s always looking for easy controversies. Russian meddling, the hijacking of Facebook and Twitter accounts to create and enlarge hyper-partisan echo chambers, and similarities between how the Trump campaign and Russian agents operated, are complex stories to report, and as Shane notes, are “still being unraveled.”
In contrast, having Kobach change the subject of illegal electioneering from Russian meddling to 5,000-plus people he falsely accuses of illegally voting in New Hampshire—blocking a Trump victory and election of another Republican senator—is not merely recycling voter fraud clichés that would appeal to Trump’s base and inflame moderates and the left. It’s a deft tactic in the pro-Trump propaganda war that Bannon promised. It has been working, as Kobach was quickly beaten up in the press by reporters on the election beat and by tweeting election experts (which Kobach predicted would happen in his piece).
Kobach may be all too willing to play the role of a martyr for the Republicans writ large or for a president who could always appoint him to a federal post if he loses an upcoming race for Kansas governor. He has a penchant for using sloppy analysis to jump to conclusions that anyone who is not a loyal Republican, such as the New Hampshire college students, must be an illegal voter.
...
===
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/kris-kobachs-breathtakingly-dishonest-claim-about-voter-fraud-in-new-hampshire/
==
http://www.alternet.org/activism/trump-has-whos-who-vote-suppressors-working-keep-gop-majority-2018
--
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/us/politics/trump-voter-fraud.html
President Trump on Thursday named Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has pressed for aggressive measures to crack down on undocumented immigrants, to a commission investigating vote fraud, following through on his unsubstantiated claim that millions of “illegals” voted for his Democratic rival and robbed him of victory in the national popular vote.
Mr. Kobach, who has championed the strictest voter identification laws in the country, will be the vice chairman of the commission, which will be led by Vice President Mike Pence and is expected to include about a dozen others, including state officials from both political parties, said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Thursday creating the commission, which Ms. Sanders said would have a broad mandate to review policies and practices that affect Americans’ confidence in the integrity of federal elections. Marc E. Lotter, Mr. Pence’s spokesman, said that voter suppression would be among the topics studied by the commission, which he said would take a wide-ranging look at problems at the state and national levels. But the order makes no mention of suppression or voting restrictions, specifying only “improper” or “fraudulent” registration and voting as issues to be explored.
Democrats and civil rights groups condemned the panel as a taxpayer-funded witch hunt, and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a legal request to the White House for records showing “concrete evidence” of fraudulent voting that would warrant the creation of such a commission.
Continue reading the main story
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The commission was created at a tumultuous time in the White House, after Mr. Trump’s abruptfiring on Tuesday of James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, who had been leading an investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. United States intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia worked to sway the election to Mr. Trump.
Ms. Sanders said the group would produce a report for Mr. Trump next year on “system vulnerabilities that lead to improper registrations and voting.” Its roots lie in Mr. Trump’s own long-festering grievances and his conviction that illegal voting — including ballots cast by people who were registered to vote in multiple states, were not citizens, or were impersonating people whose names had remained on voting rolls after they died — reduced his margin of victory.
There is no evidence to support Mr. Trump’s claims, which have been discredited repeatedly by fact-checkers, that millions of people voted illegally in 2016.
As a candidate, Mr. Trump repeatedly raised doubts about the integrity of the American voting system. After winning the election, he told members of Congress privately that three million to five million undocumented immigrants had voted illegally for Hillary Clinton, costing him the popular vote. And he promised to begin a major investigation.
Voting officials in both parties and academics across the country have long rejected the notion that fraudulent voting is widespread, finding instead that it is a sporadic and uncommon occurrence that has had no discernible effect on election outcomes. Mr. Trump’s own lawyers concluded as much about the 2016 contest, asserting in legal filings that it was “not tainted” as they sought to block recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“There are problems in the registration system that don’t translate into fraud, there are sporadic and very rare instances of fraud, and voter impersonation fraud is the rarest of all,” said Nathaniel Persily, a professor of political science at Stanford who served as the research director of the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration in 2012.
“The notion that there is widespread voting by undocumented immigrants or other ineligible voters has been studied repeatedly and found to be false,” he said.
Mr. Kobach’s influential position on the panel intensified the controversy over its creation, particularly among immigration advocacy and civil rights groups, as well as Democrats who said they feared he would use the perch to try to prevent minority voters from casting ballots.
“Selecting Kris Kobach as vice chair reveals exactly the kind of discriminatory witch hunt the American people can expect from this commission,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and the House minority leader. “The president’s ‘election integrity’ commission is clearly intended to accelerate the vile voter suppression efforts in states across the nation.”
Mr. Kobach was the driving force behind a Kansas law requiring new voters to produce a passport, a birth certificate or naturalization papers as proof of citizenship. He worked last year to disqualify the state and local votes of thousands of people who did not meet those criteria. He has advocated the proof-of-citizenship requirement at the federal level as well, alleging rampant voter fraud without producing proof of a widespread problem.
Mr. Kobach dismissed the criticism of him as a “silly reaction” and said he had no preconceived ideas of what the commission would find. He argued that there had been no previous national effort to gather “hard data,” rather than survey-based research, to quantify voting problems.
“If there’s no such thing as voter fraud, or voter fraud is insignificant, then the commission will be able to confirm that,” Mr. Kobach said in an interview. “What are they afraid of? Why do they not want to know these numbers?”
Ms. Sanders said the commission would also include the Republicans Connie Lawson, the secretary of state of Indiana, and Kenneth Blackwell, who formerly held that post in Ohio, as well as two top Democratic election officials: William M. Gardner of New Hampshire and Matthew Dunlap of Maine. Christy McCormick, a Republican member of the nonpartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission appointed by President Barack Obama, has also been selected to serve on the panel.
“The president’s committed to the thorough review of registration and voting issues in federal elections, and that’s exactly what this commission is tasked with doing,” Ms. Sanders said. “The commission will review policies and practices that enhance or undermine the American people’s confidence in the integrity of federal elections and provide the president with a report that identifies system vulnerabilities that lead to improper registrations and voting.”
Civil rights groups reacted with alarm to the creation of the task force, arguing that Mr. Trump’s own claims of illegal voting by immigrants suggested that his intent was to work to restrict the voting rights of minorities.
Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called the commission “a thinly veiled voter suppression task force,” adding that it was “designed to impugn the integrity of African-American and Latino participation in the political process.”
Democratic lawmakers said the commission was ill-conceived at best and a potential front for discriminatory policies at worst.
“Instead of focusing on the myth of voter fraud, the president should be looking at ways to make it easier for eligible Americans to vote, given how difficult it is for some individuals to vote in this country,” said Senator Benjamin A. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said the president was “chasing a unicorn” with taxpayer money and “perpetuating the dangerous myth that widespread voter fraud exists.”
==
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2013/jun/17/kobach-says-he-considering-filing-charges-against-/
cf youtube
EKA — Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said today he is considering filing criminal charges against immigration reform advocates who protested on his home's porch over the weekend. Those who helped organize and participated in the protest said nothing improper happened.
Reports indicated that anywhere from 100 to 300 people participated in the protest at Kobach's home in western Wyandotte County on Saturday.
of the event showed people standing on Kobach's porch and in the driveway chanting pro-immigration slogans and leaving pairs of shoes that they said represented the shoes of fathers who have been deported because of Kobach's anti-immigration policies.
Kobach, a Republican who has built a national profile pushing tough illegal immigration laws, called the protesters a mob and said they were trying to intimidate him.
Kobach, his wife and their young daughters were not home at the time. "If my daughters had seen 200 people coming up the driveway, it would have been very scary for them," Kobach said.
"We are looking into what charges will be filed," he said. "There are a variety of charges, a number of statutes that apply," he said, mentioning criminal threat, criminal terrorism, and littering.
He said neighbors called police, who arrived and were on the scene when the protesters dispersed.
But Louis Goseland, of Sunflower Community Action, which organized the protest, said the Wichita-based group did nothing illegal. He said police who were there gave no warnings but just wanted to make sure no one was blocking the street.
Goseland said the protesters weren't trying to intimidate Kobach and no angry rhetoric was used. He said they were making a statement in opposition to his policies.
In November, about 50 people rallied outside Kobach's secretary of state office in Topeka. Several tried to meet with Kobach, but Kobach's spokeswoman met them downstairs from his office and told them that Kobach wouldn't meet with them because his schedule was full and he didn't conduct immigration-related business in his state office. Kobach has often said he works on anti-illegal-immigration issues, often for other states, on his own time.
Goseland said Kobach lists his law office address as his home address, so the group decided to protest outside his home.
But Kobach said that didn't give protesters the right to come onto his porch.
In an interview with Fox News today, Kobach said the incident should serve as a reminder of the need for Second Amendment gun rights. But Kobach told the Lawrence Journal-World he was not implying he would have used a gun against the protesters.
see palast best democ
==
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Donald Trump’s campaign manager said Friday that a source of the Republican’s unfounded allegation that millions voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Kellyanne Conway, the Trump-Pence campaign manager who has continued to help the president-elect during the transition, made the comment on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“The president-elect has been talking to different people, including Kris Kobach of Kansas, about voting irregularities or the number of illegal votes that may have been cast,” Conway told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “And I believe that he bases his information on that.”
“There is no evidence that there were millions of illegal votes. Zero,” Stephanopoulos replied.
“There’s also no evidence that a recount is going to change the results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania,” Conway said, referring to Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s recount efforts in those states.
Democrat Hillary Clinton leads Trump by more than 2 million in the nationwide popular vote.
But Trump won the presidency with more than 300 projected Electoral College votes. The Electoral College is the state-by-state tally used to determine who wins the presidency.
“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump wrote in a tweet Sunday.
Kobach, a vocal supporter of the president-elect, said Wednesday that he supports Trump’s claim, despite offering no evidence of mass voter fraud happening in the 2016 election.
“I think the president-elect is absolutely correct when he says the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the popular-vote margin between him and Hillary Clinton at this point,” Kobach said.
Kobach then tried to back up his claim by citing a survey of the 2008 presidential election. The analysis he cited Wednesday has been widely criticized and debunked by both political scientists and the Harvard-run group that collected the data used in the analysis.
==
rnla off bs:
...5/4/2016:Kobach gets another conviciton.
Secretary of State Kris Kobach on Wednesday secured his fourth voter fraud conviction in a case against a Wichita man accused of double voting in Kansas and Colorado at least twice – and Kobach said he plans to file more cases soon. Wichita man pleads guilty in Kansas voter fraud case The Wichita Eagle, May 4, 2016
4/28/2016: Another double voter.
According to a news release, Michael L. Hannum received the maximum fines for violation of Kansas voting laws. Hannum pleaded guilty on Thursday to one count of advance voting unlawful acts and two counts of voting without being qualified. He was fined a total of $5,500 for the misdemeanor violations. Kansas Man Convicted for Double Voting WIBW News Now, Apr 28, 2016
4/27/2016: School board election fraud.
Two people face voter fraud charges stemming from the Elizabeth school election last fall in which they allegedly filled out applications for absentee ballots for voters who did not exist or for people who were not eligible to vote, authorities said today. 2 charged with voter fraud in Elizabeth school board election Newark 35, Apr 27,2016
4/22/2016: Another Vote Fraud Conviction in Kansas.
Randal Kilian, 62, pleaded guilty Thursday in Ellis County District Court to a misdemeanor for illegally voting in both Kansas and Colorado and agreed to pay a $2,500 fine, The Wichita Eagle reported. As part of the plea, two companion charges were dropped. Kobach wins 2nd conviction in double-voting prosecution Lawrence Journal-World, Apr 22,2016...
==
ref
Secretary of State Kris Kobach on Wednesday secured his fourth voter fraud conviction in a case against a Wichita man accused of double voting in Kansas and Colorado at least twice – and Kobach said he plans to file more cases soon.
“Stay tuned. We expect that we will be filing some additional cases in the very near future,” Kobach said in an interview after Ron Weems pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts in Sedgwick County District Court and agreed to pay $5,500 in fines.
Weems, 77, is the latest Kansan to be convicted of election crimes since the Legislature granted Kobach’s office prosecutorial authority over such allegations last July.
Weems was registered to vote in Wichita and Teller County, Colo., and did so in both states in the 2012 and 2014 general elections, leading to his criminal charges.
Cases of three other Kansans accused of double voting have reached similar conclusions – with misdemeanor convictions agreed to in plea deals and fines ranging from $500 to $5,500.
As of Wednesday, a fifth case, filed in Sherman County against Lincoln Wilson, was headed to trial, Kobach said. Charges against a sixth Kansan were dropped last month.
“Double voting is likely to remain the … most frequent form of voter fraud that we prosecute going forward because it occurs with regularity and because it’s one of the kinds of fraud we can’t prevent with proof of citizenship and photo ID,” Kobach said.
The fines are “exactly what I wanted to see in cases like this when I made the case before Kansas Legislature that this authority was needed,” he said.
“A $5,000 fine is very significant, and hopefully something no one would want to have to pay.”
Weems on Wednesday morning pleaded guilty to two counts of voting without being qualified and one count of knowingly marking or transmitting more than one advance ballot. In return, Kobach’s office dismissed the two most serious charges against him – both election perjury, which are felonies – involving accusations that he unlawfully signed a Kansas poll book affidavit in the November 2012 and 2014 general elections.
Wichita attorney Jim McIntyre, after Weems’ plea hearing, called his client’s double voting “inadvertent.” He said Weems opted to end the case with a plea rather than continue with what might have been a lengthy prosecution, in part, because of his age.
Weems won’t face jail time or probation, McIntyre said, but agreed to pay a total fine of $5,500 – $2,500 each for two of the counts and $500 for the third. And he can seek expungement of the convictions after three years, he said.
Weems’ voting registration address in Kansas and the mailing address on his Colorado registration match up to a small industrial building near the Intrust Bank Arena. He registered to vote in Sedgwick County in 1980 and in Colorado in 2003, records show.
His guilty plea came prior to his scheduled preliminary hearing in case.
Kobach, in an e-mailed statement after Weems’ plea, said the voter fraud prosecutions “demonstrate our commitment to ensuring that Kansas has the most secure elections in the country.”
The three other Kansans convicted under his prosecutorial authority are:
▪ Steven K. Gaedtke, 60, who in December agreed to pay a $500 fine after pleading guilty to one misdemeanor count alleging he voted in both Johnson County and in Arkansas in 2010; charges against his wife, Betty, were dropped because the signature on her absentee ballot and her actual signature didn’t match.
▪ Randall Kilian, 62, who last month agreed to pay a $2,500 fine after pleading guilty to one misdemeanor count alleging he voted in both Ellis County and in Colorado in 2012.
▪ Michael L. Hannum, 64, who last week agreed to pay a total of $5,500 in fines after pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts alleging he voted in both Johnson County and in Nebraska in 2012.
Amy Renee Leiker: 316-268-6644, @amyreneeleiker
Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article75545277.html#storylink=cpy
==
Rumor has it that even though he seemed to be reacting in response to questions from the press this week, Donald Trump has wanted to launch his “voter fraud” investigation ever since he realized he lost the popular vote by a huge margin — and people inside the administration were desperately trying to talk him out of it. I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but Trump has made it clear since the election that he believes there was massive fraud in November:
Follow
Donald J. Trump ? @realDonaldTrump
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
12:30 PM - 27 Nov 2016
53,946 53,946 Retweets 163,627 163,627 likes
For the record, there’s no evidence that systematic voter fraud exists. None. Nonetheless, Trump repeatedly made the claim the election was “rigged” during the campaign, eventually saying that he would accept the election results — if he won. He even lied about that. He won, but he still won’t accept the results.
It's obvious that this obsession with voter fraud in the face of winning an election is another aspect of Trump’s bottomless narcissism. From what he said in his interview with David Muir on ABC, he believes that the problem only exists in places he didn’t win. He told Muir that every one of the alleged 2 million to 3 million illegal votes went to Hillary Clinton. But it’s important to recognize that Trump is felicitously playing into the hands of right-wing operatives who have been working to suppress the votes of Democratic constituencies for years. And they are very excited about this new “investigation.”
One of Trump’s advisers on immigration, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has reportedly been encouraging Trump to initiate this investigation. He told the Wichita Eagle on Wednesday:
I’ve advised [Trump] on the issue of voter fraud in multiple forms. I’m not the only one, but he’s been very interested in finding ways to reduce voter fraud.
I know that he is interested in investigating the issue on a national scale, but I also know that he would like to see the Justice Department launch specific investigations where there is real serious, specific evidence of voter fraud.
There seems to be a plan to focus this “voter fraud” investigation on the big liberal states and urban areas that do not vote for Republicans. Indeed, this is something the right wing has been trying to do for years and it was that effort that led to one of the greatest political scandals of the George W. Bush administration: the U.S. attorney scandal. You may recall that this was all about trying to force federal prosecutors to pursue phony voter fraud cases in Democratic states, often against Democratic officials. When these prosecutors refused, they were fired and replaced.
I’ve written about Kobach for Salon before, both when he was a somewhat obscure figure in the conservative movement and again when he ascended to the highest levels of national politics. He has two missions in life, and they’re tied together. The first is to suppress the votes of Democrats and the second is to curb immigration. The Republicans see both of these goals as essential to their ability to win in the future since their base of white conservative voters is shrinking. Trump’s motives are simpler, as are his supporters': They believe immigrants and American-born people of color are cheating at the ballot box in order to gain “goodies” from the federal government, at the expense of hardworking real Americans.
But Kobach is not the only person pushing these two interconnected issues. There is an entire political industry devoted to it, from sophisticated election attorney networks like the Republican National Lawyers Association to grassroots organizations like True the Vote. And there are certain “experts” who have been around for a long while, pushing the issue whenever the opportunity presents itself.
One of them is a man with the striking name of Hans von Spakovsky. Those who follow voting issues are very familiar with him from his time in the Bush administration’s Department of Justice voting section, where he worked to undermine the Voting Rights Act and played fast and loose with ethical rules, as amply documented in a piece by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate. Von Spakovsky was serving as a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission at the time and up for consideration as a permanent member. The Democratic Senate refused to confirm him, and not just because of his ethical lapses. He is a zealous activist for vote suppression all over the country.
He, too, has an attitude that often reveals his underlying motivations. He recently spoke with Breitbart News:
“Their attitude towards any voter fraud prosecutions has always been: if the defendants are black, well, you must be doing it for racist reasons,” he noted. “Remember, we saw that in the New Black Panther story out of Philly in 2008, when Eric Holder came in and immediately dismissed the voter intimidation case against them, despite the overwhelming evidence that the Black Panthers had been intimidating voters and poll watchers. It was dismissed by the Obama Justice Department because they didn’t believe that black defendants should be prosecuted. They don’t believe in the race-neutral enforcement of the voting and election law.”
The New Black Panther case was another cynical attempt by the right wing to turn the tables on Democrats and the Obama administration to show that African-Americans are the real racists. It was absurd but made for good copy and continued to provide cover for conservatives who seemed to see vote fraud in every urban neighborhood where black or brown people lived.
This week von Spakovsky wrote an op-ed for Fox News with fellow voter-fraud obsessive John Fund of the National Review, lauding President Trump for his decision to investigate. They relitigated the tiresome New Black Panther story and accused the Obama-Holder Justice Department of encouraging nonexistent systematic voter fraud by refusing to force states to purge voters from the rolls, quoting the same Pew study that Donald Trump cites as his expert source on the subject. (The author of the study has repeatedly made it clear that he did not find evidence of voter fraud. They keep citing it anyway.) In particular, they cited California as being a hive of fraudulent voter activity that requires federal intervention.
It’s unknown at this point who will be heading Trump’s “investigation” or what form it’s likely to take. (It’s always possible that more rational White House aides can talk the president out of this foolhardy and wasteful boondoggle.) But Kobach is definitely advising him informally and you can be sure von Spakovsky stands ready to help in any way he can, along with dozens of others who have been working on this so-called issue for many years. Their calling is keeping people from voting, and Donald Trump has given these zealots a new lease on life.
Heather Digby Parton
===
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/inside-trumps-bogus-investigation-voter-fraud-lies-gops-long-crusade-keep-people
Rumor has it that even though he seemed to be reacting in response to questions from the press this week, Donald Trump has wanted to launch his “voter fraud” investigation ever since he realized he lost the popular vote by a huge margin — and people inside the administration were desperately trying to talk him out of it. I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but Trump has made it clear since the election that he believes there was massive fraud in November: >For the record, there’sno evidence that systematic voter fraud exists. None. Nonetheless, Trump repeatedly made the claim the election was “rigged” during the campaign, eventually saying that he would accept the election results — if he won. He even lied about that. He won, but he still won’t accept the results.
It's obvious that this obsession with voter fraud in the face of winning an election is another aspect of Trump’s bottomless narcissism. From what he said in his interview with David Muir on ABC, he believes that the problem only exists in places he didn’t win. He told Muir that every one of the alleged 2 million to 3 million illegal votes went to Hillary Clinton. But it’s important to recognize that Trump is felicitously playing into the hands of right-wing operatives who have been working to suppress the votes of Democratic constituencies for years. And they are very excited about this new “investigation.”
One of Trump’s advisers on immigration, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has reportedly been encouraging Trump to initiate this investigation. He told the Wichita Eagle on Wednesday:
I’ve advised [Trump] on the issue of voter fraud in multiple forms. I’m not the only one, but he’s been very interested in finding ways to reduce voter fraud.
I know that he is interested in investigating the issue on a national scale, but I also know that he would like to see the Justice Department launch specific investigations where there is real serious, specific evidence of voter fraud.
There seems to be a plan to focus this “voter fraud” investigation on the big liberal states and urban areas that do not vote for Republicans. Indeed, this is something the right wing has been trying to do for years and it was that effort that led to one of the greatest political scandals of the George W. Bush administration: the U.S. attorney scandal. You may recall that this was all about trying to force federal prosecutors to pursue phony voter fraud cases in Democratic states, often against Democratic officials. When these prosecutors refused, they were fired and replaced.
I’ve written about Kobach for Salon before, both when he was a somewhat obscure figure in the conservative movement and again when he ascended to the highest levels of national politics. He has two missions in life, and they’re tied together. The first is to suppress the votes of Democrats and the second is to curb immigration. The Republicans see both of these goals as essential to their ability to win in the future since their base of white conservative voters is shrinking. Trump’s motives are simpler, as are his supporters': They believe immigrants and American-born people of color are cheating at the ballot box in order to gain “goodies” from the federal government, at the expense of hardworking real Americans.
But Kobach is not the only person pushing these two interconnected issues. There is an entire political industry devoted to it, from sophisticated election attorney networks like the Republican National Lawyers Association to grassroots organizations like True the Vote. And there are certain “experts” who have been around for a long while, pushing the issue whenever the opportunity presents itself.
One of them is a man with the striking name of Hans von Spakovsky. Those who follow voting issues are very familiar with him from his time in the Bush administration’s Department of Justice voting section, where he worked to undermine the Voting Rights Act and played fast and loose with ethical rules, as amply documented in a piece by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate. Von Spakovsky was serving as a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission at the time and up for consideration as a permanent member. The Democratic Senate refused to confirm him, and not just because of his ethical lapses. He is a zealous activist for vote suppression all over the country.
He, too, has an attitude that often reveals his underlying motivations. He recently spoke with Breitbart News:
“Their attitude towards any voter fraud prosecutions has always been: if the defendants are black, well, you must be doing it for racist reasons,” he noted. “Remember, we saw that in the New Black Panther story out of Philly in 2008, when Eric Holder came in and immediately dismissed the voter intimidation case against them, despite the overwhelming evidence that the Black Panthers had been intimidating voters and poll watchers. It was dismissed by the Obama Justice Department because they didn’t believe that black defendants should be prosecuted. They don’t believe in the race-neutral enforcement of the voting and election law.”
The New Black Panther case was another cynical attempt by the right wing to turn the tables on Democrats and the Obama administration to show that African-Americans are the real racists. It was absurd but made for good copy and continued to provide cover for conservatives who seemed to see vote fraud in every urban neighborhood where black or brown people lived.
This week von Spakovsky wrote an op-ed for Fox News with fellow voter-fraud obsessive John Fund of the National Review, lauding President Trump for his decision to investigate. They relitigated the tiresome New Black Panther story and accused the Obama-Holder Justice Department of encouraging nonexistent systematic voter fraud by refusing to force states to purge voters from the rolls, quoting the same Pew study that Donald Trump cites as his expert source on the subject. (The author of the study has repeatedly made it clear that he did not find evidence of voter fraud. They keep citing it anyway.) In particular, they cited Californiaas being a hive of fraudulent voter activity that requires federal intervention.
It’s unknown at this point who will be heading Trump’s “investigation” or what form it’s likely to take. (It’s always possible that more rational White House aides can talk the president out of this foolhardy and wasteful boondoggle.) But Kobach is definitely advising him informally and you can be sure von Spakovsky stands ready to help in any way he can, along with dozens of others who have been working on this so-called issue for many years. Their calling is keeping people from voting, and Donald Trump has given these zealots a new lease on life.
Heather Digby Parton
===
===
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/36760-focus-greg-palast-with-dennis-bernstein-trumps-gop-hitman-whos-stealing-your-vote
Dennis Bernstein:Welcome back to our weekly Election Protection Bulletin with best-selling author Greg Palast. Let's start in Topeka, Kansas with its Secretary of State Kris Kobach. He's definitely going head to head with the ACLU there.
Greg Palast: Kris Kobach is spelled like Koch with a BA in the middle. He's the most influential Republican secretary of state in America - the Katherine Harris of 2016.
He's one of the very first governmental Republican supporters of Donald Trump. Anne Coulter has
said Trump should pick him as his running mate. This guy is an important cat.
What's he up to? He's “saving” America from an invasion of aliens - not from outer space, but from other nations, wading the Rio Grande to vote in American elections. He claims there is a mass incursion of illegal aliens coming to the US to vote for Hillary.
The federal government, despite a massive and costly hunt, has found almost no non-citizen has voted. (Florida’s campaign to stop alien voters netted a single conviction—an Austrian who registered Republican, while threatening the votes of 181,000.) Yet, Kobach’s envisioning the alien ships are there. To prevent this crime that doesn't happen, he's required anyone registering to vote in Kansas to prove their citizenship.
This is not as easy as it sounds. A driver’s license doesn't count. A social security card doesn't count. Only naturalization papers, a passport, or an original birth certificate count. As a result, the state of Kansas has suspended the registration of 36,000 young people. [This doesn’t affect Kobach’s voters who have an average age of 115.]
This is very effective at keeping out voters of color and young people. Not many poor Americans or people of color have passports. They have not just returned from their vacation in the Alps with their
passport in hand. Many people, including those who were born at home, cannot find their original birth certificate. This is crushing the voter rolls of the state of Kansas. Now it’s in Georgia as well.
DB: This has become a model for many states.
GP: Kris Koback wrote SB 1070 for the state of Arizona, which was mostly thrown out by the courts as racist and unconstitutional. This guy is no foolish redneck bigot. He's a graduate of Harvard, Yale and Oxford.
A few years ago, Indiana was the first state to require a photo voter ID to vote. There was only that one state in 2006, and now 23 states require it. If Kobach gets away with requiring citizenship proof in Alabama, Kansas and Georgia, you can bet that coming soon will be North Carolina, Arizona, Florida and many others. They know what they are doing.
And dig this: It’s quite unusual that Kobach, as Secretary of State of Kansas, is still counsel, a lawyer, for a group IRLI, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is the legal arm of two allied groups called Numbers USA and FAIR. FAIR is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group. It was founded by John Tanton, who says
the purpose of the group is to maintain a "European American majority."
Kobach - while a lawyer for the hate group and Secretary of State of Kansas at the same time - has also been the lawyer for Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Arpaio was officially charged with racism by the US Justice Department.)
As Secretary of State of Kansas, Kobach is in charge of voting in Kansas— and the most influential Republican voting official in the US.
Kobach has mounted a frontal assault on the federal voter protection, starting with the Motor Voter law.
Under Bill Clinton, the US made a huge leap in the voter franchise - the biggest since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - by enacting the Motor Voter Law. Now, when you get a driver's license, you fill out the attached form and you become a voter. Adding voter registration forms to the driver’s license
application has massively increased the reach of voter registration in America.
The Republicans, especially Kobach, really hate it. They say the federal motor voter form does not require that you prove your citizenship. You need to be a citizen, sign a box saying you are a citizen and sign it.
So Kobach said that if you register on the federal form, YOU CAN’T VOTE IN STATE ELECTIONS unless you register separately with your proof of citizenship.
The result: There are 36,000 young people in Kansas , especially young voters of color, whose state voting rights have been suspended. So Kansas literally has an official apartheid voting system.
DB: The ACLU filed a motion for summary judgment seeking to declare this as an illegal system based on dual registration. Where is this case going?
GP: There’s a terrible new twist.
Kobach asked the federal government to make a special voter form for his state, and other white Republican-controlled states of Alabama and Georgia. The federal government and courts turned him down.
But then, one of his acolytes became the chief of the federal Elections Assistance Commission. Kobach’s man Brian Newby is now the Executive Director of the agency that’s supposed to protect our vote!
Newby’s first act in office was to allow Kansas, Georgia and Alabama to have their own special voter
registration form—allowing those states to require proof of citizenship to vote. This may moot the ACLU's complaint because the federal form now includes this special extra hurdle for voters in those state to prove citizenship.
This is a devastatingly effective means to suppress the registration of new, young, minorities and low-income voters. So, the ACLU has sued the US agency as well. Weirdly (and thankfully), the US Justice Dept. is backing the ACLU against the federal government.
Then the League of Women Voters joined the ACLU to sue the federal agency. Kobach's response was to call the League of Women Voters the "Communist League of Women Voters." Reporters couldn't believe their ears, so he repeated, "The Communist League of Women Voters."
Is there really a danger non-citizens will flood the polling stations? The reason folks who are not citizens never vote is that the Motor Voter Form asks you to state if you’re a citizen — and makes it
perfectly clear that if you lie, you can go to prison for five years. People aren't going to risk going to prison for five years just to vote for school board, or even for president. There’s been no problem with this. Why would an alien without documents sign a form with their address? To make it easier for ICE to snap them up? It’s nuts. But Kobach won’t accept this. He demands a passport or original birth certificate or you don't get to register.
Consider the implications of this new voter form for November.
Georgia will be a swing state in 2016 and Alabama has a crucial Senate race this year. Blocking voters who can't easily prove they are citizens has killed registrations among young voters in these states.
Guess which way young people vote?
As an investigative reporter I follow the money. Who is behind this latest suppression tactic, the attack on voters as potential aliens?. Who is paying for Kobach?
A group called Numbers USA gave $100,000 to a little town called Farmers Branch, Texas. The town gave that $100,000 to Kobach to defend a racist law that was immediately thrown out by the courts. Numbers USA is funded by something called Donors’ Trust—which, in turn, is the funnel for the funds from the Charles and David Koch. So, where does Kris Kobach get his pin money? He gets it from the brothers Koch, through a chain of front organizations.
DB: The Koch brothers say publicly they are stepping out of this election because they don't support Trump, so don't want any part of this. We assume they are not controlling the structure of the
election. But they are only talking about one candidate. Their hands are all over everything - who has the control, the power, and who has *the right to vote in the future of this country, which is now a whiteminority.
GP:Let's not fall for the jive. It's not whether they support Trump or not. The Koch brothers are putting $900 million - just short of a billion dollars - into this election. If it's not for the presidency, what is it for? It's very clear: If the Republicans lose just four senate seats - and they've got 24 seats up for grabs - the control of the Senate flips to the Democrats.
...
==
==
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/kris-kobach-architect-draconian-anti-immigrant-policies-joining-trumps-transition-team
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/architect-most-racist-law-modern-american-history-has-been-named-trumps-team
FAIR
==
https://www.splcenter.org/20161118/kris-kobach-lawyer-americas-nativist-movement
no link
Kris Kobach has been a central figure in the nativist movement for more than a decade and is the architect of Arizona’s notorious “papers please” law as well as a series of other anti-immigrant statutes enacted by states and municipalities in the past decade.
He also has close ties to white nationalist leaders.
A Yale-trained lawyer, Kobach has served as counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) since 2004. IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group whose leaders have historical ties to white supremacists and eugenicists and who have made numerous racist statements.[1] He joined IRLI after a two-year stint as a White House fellow working in the U.S. Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft during the Bush administration.
In consultation with former Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce in 2010, Kobach authored the infamous SB 1070 in Arizona, which the Supreme Court found largely unconstitutional in 2012. He was also instrumental in the passage of similar laws in other towns and states, including Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. The laws varied in scope but generally encouraged racial profiling of Latinos by local and state law enforcement and criminalized many aspects of undocumented immigrants’ lives. Most provisions of those laws have been overturned by federal courts or gutted by settlements in lawsuits filed by civil rights groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center.
For nearly 15 years, Kobach has worked to enact a nativist agenda, often from within the government.As secretary of state in Kansas since 2010, he has continued to serve as legal counsel to IRLI. Here are highlights of his anti-immigrant activism:
As a White House fellow working in the Justice Department beginning in 2001, Kobach shepherded a program requiring tens of thousands of Muslim and Middle Eastern visa holders to register with the government and be fingerprinted. The program, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) was operational until 2011, when it was shut down after drawing broad criticism for its racial profiling.
In 2002, Kobach wrote a memo for Ashcroft essentially outlining the policies that would become Arizona’s SB 1070. He argued that local and state police have the power to arrest undocumented immigrants for civil violations of immigration law.
The Justice Department in 2002 reduced the number of Board of Immigration Appeals judges from 19 to 11, creating a backlog of cases that had disastrous consequences for immigrants. Kobach took credit.
Kobach ran for Congress in Kansas in 2004, receiving $10,000 in campaign contributions from U.S. Immigration PAC, which was operated by FAIR founder John Tanton’s wife. Kobach had joined IRLI, FAIR’s legal arm, that year. Kobach lost the election in part because his opponent attacked him for his ties to FAIR, calling him a racist.
As senior counsel to the IRLI, Kobach sued the state of Kansas in 2004 over a law passed that year granting in-state tuition to high school graduates born to undocumented immigrant parents. The court rejected Kobach’s claims in 2006.
Kobach co-wrote Arizona’s SB 1070 with former Arizona Senate leader Russell Pearce. The law passed in 2010 and, like bills in other places also drafted by Kobach, cost those states and cities millions in taxpayer funds and lost revenue. Arizona voters recalled Pearce, not only because of SB 1070’s failures but also for circulating racist emails among legislators.
Kobach embraced birtherism in 2010 while campaigning for secretary of state in Kansas. Questions about President Obama’s birthplace are fair, he said at a rally, as long as Obama failed to release his “long-form” birth certificate.
In 2012, Kobach proposed banning “foreign law” as a policy position for the Republican National Convention, which adopted the language into its platform. As justification, Kobach claimed that “in cases involving either spousal abuse or assault or other crimes against persons, sometimes defenses are raised that are based in Shariah law."
In 2014, Kobach spearheaded a program to purge voter rolls. The program, called Interstate Crosscheck, compiled a master list that included the names of one-seventh of all African-American voters in 27 states, whom officials alleged were under suspicion for voting twice in the same election, according to Al Jazeera America. Millions of the names were mismatched and the program ignored discrepancies.
Kobach lobbied the Kansas Legislature in 2015 to give his office the power to prosecute voter fraud,making Kansas the only state in the U.S. to grant its secretary of state such powers. Kobach promised to stop “illegal” voters; after originally claiming he knew of 100 cases of double voting, he filed only six cases as of May 2016. Regardless, he told the Washington Post: “The reason we have to do this is a significant problem in Kansas and in the rest of the country of aliens getting on our voting rolls.”
In October 2015, Kobach was a featured speaker at a “writers’ workshop” put on by The Social Contract Press, a racist publishing house that regularly publishes the writings of white nationalists. TSCP is a project of another foundation, U.S. Inc., created by FAIR’s Tanton.
In 2012, Kobach claimed he had not done any legal work for any organization that “expresses or supports racial discrimination.” However, FAIR has received $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, an organization founded in 1937 by Nazi sympathizers. FAIR’s current president, Dan Stein, said in 1994 that immigration reform in the 1960s was “revengism” against whites and that its supporters wanted to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.” He has claimed immigrants are “getting into competitive breeding.”
[1] The SPLC has listed FAIR as a hate group since 2007. It was founded by Michigan ophthalmologist John Tanton, the founder and principal ideologue of the modern anti-immigrant movement in the United States. Tanton spent decades at the heart of the white nationalist movement and corresponded with former Klan lawyers, Holocaust deniers and leading white nationalist intellectuals. He also founded and operated The Social Contract Press, a racist publishing company. FAIR has accepted more than $1 million from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation devoted to proving a connection between race and intelligence. FAIR also has hired as key officials men who were active in white supremacist groups ...New movie and book by Greg Palast, the investigative reporter who first uncovered the way Florida Republicans intentionally purged tens of thousands of voters before the 2000 presidential election (followed by officials in the state’s black belt counties disqualifying more than 100,000 “spoiled” ballots), raises new threats to what we’re told is a democratic process. In The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, Palast, with equal parts humor and indignation, calls the 2016 election “a crime still in progress and a hunt for the guys who will do it.”
Though Palast shrewdly follows up, saying, “I don’t have a clue” as to the shape 2016’s assault on popular democracy will assume, he has some good ideas about where to start looking. His onscreen trek takes viewers on a two-hour journey in which he cleverly shows the pattern that has dominated American presidential elections since 2000. What is different about this Palast film is that he connects dots to explain why this is happening, who is benefiting, how the dirty business is done, and who the likely villains in 2016 are.
Half of the the film contains entertaining scenes of Palast preparing to chase down and ambush elected Republicans like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who built his political career by defending the rights of white people and vilifying immigrants. Kobach now runs an exceptionally flawed interstate computer operation that tries to track down people who are registered to vote in more than one state. His operation, called Interstate Crosscheck, assumes that any two people with the same name—or similar enough sounding names even if a middle initial varies—are readymade voting criminals who need to be purged from voter rolls. That sounds almost comical except this operation is taken seriously in states like Georgia, where the secretary of state hands a list to the attorney general, who in turn hands a list to lowly county officials and then begins the process of targeting and removing legal voters. As Palast’s onscreen data analysts note, a disproportionate number of people with similar sounding names happen to be non-white, which correlates with likely Democratic voters.
Crosscheck’s data is so blurry and the election officials who defend it are so opaque that Palast raises a point that is easily lost in the details and weeds of trying to understand why America’s system of voting isn’t more simple and straightforward. He posits that it is intentionally designed to be sloppy so it victimizes more likely minority and low-income voters. A variation on this political tactic is the intentional complexity many red states are imposing on these very same populations. Newly adopted legal technicalities, such as not having proper state ID, not properly filling out ballots and having ballots that are disqualified for “spoilage,” are wielded by white Republicans who fear an epidemic of double voting, voter fraud and other imagined ballot security nightmares that never seem to materialize on Election Day.
Why don’t Republicans want people of color and poor people voting? That becomes clear as Palast chases after billionaires who made fortunes in 2008’s global financial meltdown, such as hedge fund manager John Paulson and international vulture capitalist John Singer. There is no such thing as a billionaire whose fortune hasn’t left a trail of pain, Palast notes as he visits their victims and gets stone-faced answers when confronting these men at high society gatherings. Palast's point is the only way that billionaires can get away with their obscene profiteering is by taking away the voting rights of the people they prey on.
The film shows how the nation’s most notorious and rapacious libertarians, the Koch brothers of Kansas, are bankrolling many of the front groups and elected Republicans who have shredded voting rights. The Kochs were behind the Texas-based group whose lawsuit successfully gutted the Voting Rights Act. (In Alabama, where that suit was filed, right after the ruling came down in 2013 the state quickly passed a law requiring voters have a new ID that can be obtained at the state motor vehicle agency, but then closed those DMVs across their black belt counties.) The Kochs also bankrolled one of Kobach’s pro-white, anti-immigrant lawsuits in which he personally pocketed tens of thousands of dollars, Palast reports.
...
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/greg-palasts-new-film-exposes-how-republican-oligarchs-are-crusading-stop-people-color
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2012 Arizona 3,545,891 Michigan 7,337,846
Arkansas 1,528,458 Mississippi 2,002,406
Colorado 3,375,891 Missouri 4,069,576
Illinois 8,248,736 Nebraska 1,129,943
Iowa 2,113,199 Oklahoma 2,000,767
Kansas 1,702,495 South Dakota 560,147
Kentucky 1,303,684 Tennessee 3,468,503
Louisiana 2,860,281
later oregon?!
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ref
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/11/02/what%E2%80%99s-matter-kansas%E2%80%99-kris-kobach
The Social Contract Press is a Michigan-based publishing house that routinely puts out race-baiting articles penned by well known white nationalists. The press is a program of U.S., Inc., the foundation created by John Tanton, the racist founder and principal ideologue of the modern nativist movement and TSCP’s publisher. Tanton has assiduously cultivated relationships with Holocaust deniers, eugenicists and various other extremists over the years. And he’s clear about his racism: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
Given TSCP’s publisher, it’s not surprising that articles from their eponymous journal The Social Contract have propagated the myth that Latino activists want to occupy and "reclaim" the American Southwest, argued that no Muslim immigrants should be allowed into the United States and claimed that multiculturalists are trying to replace “successful Euro-American culture” with “dysfunctional Third World cultures.”
Nor should we be surprised that the journal is edited by Wayne Lutton, a longtime member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, the hate group that inspired the Charleston mass shooter Dylann Roof. Also on staff is well known white supremacist Kevin Lamb, who was fired in 2005 by Human Events and the Evans-Novak Political Report over his extremist activities.
Kobach’s closeness to hate groups runs far deeper than speaking to TSCP. For years, Kobach has worked as a lawyer for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The Southern Poverty Law Center has listed FAIR as a hate group since 2007—and for good reason.
Tanton founded FAIR, and its current President Dan Stein has said, among other things, “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for.” In another instance, Stein said that the 1965 Immigration Act, which undid four decades of explicitly racist immigration policy in the United States, “was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris…and it’s a form of revengism, or revenge, that these forces continue to push the immigration policy that they know full well are [sic] creating chaos and will continue to create chaos down the line.”
One has to wonder if Kobach will be held to the same standard by his fellow Republicans as Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) was last December, when it came to light that he had attended a dozen years earlier an event put on by former Klansman David Duke’s European Unity and Rights Organization. Scalise ultimately apologized.
Kobach was at a hate group event last week—not a decade ago.
Of course, Kobach has been working with FAIR for almost decade and no one has held him to account. Worse, in 2012, he dissimulated about his relationship to FAIR and Tanton. In a piece published by Salon, Kobach was quoted claiming that he is “not familiar with [Tanton’s] writings or his views.” He also said: “I have not done any legal work for any organization that expresses or supports racial discrimination, nor will I ever do so in the future.” Just the year before, the New York Times ran a front-page storylaying out Tanton’s racism at length.
So what is Kobach’s excuse now? It’s been three years since he was last asked about Tanton by Salon. Surely by now Kobach can no longer play dumb. After all, Tanton is the publisher of TSCP. That’s where Kobach went to speak last week.
Given Kobach’s racially charged main efforts of recent years—working to restrict voting rights and curtail immigration—his relationship with racist groups isn’t too difficult to understand. Maybe it’s time to question Kobach’s claims that he is simply pursuing these issues to enforce the law. His strange bedfellows in the white nationalist movement would certainly agree that fewer immigrants and stricter voting procedures are a good thing, because, well, that would stop brown and black people from being empowered.
It’s time for Kobach, too, to be asked if that’s what drives him.
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/23/1331799/-Kansas-Supreme-Court-deals-another-blow-to-the-worst-secretary-of-state-in-the-nation
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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/kris-kobach
- Kris Kobach. Kris Kobach wants to be your president one day; until now, he has gotten as far as Kansas Secretary of State. He may be best known as the brains behind Arizona’s “show me your papers” law, and he successfully pushed for anti-immigrant language in the platform, including a call for the federal government to deny funds to universities that allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition – a plank that puts Kobach and the platform at odds with Kansas law. Immigration is not Kobach’s only issue. He is an energizing force behind the Republican Party’s massive push for voter suppression laws around the country, and he led the effort to get language inserted into the platform calling on states to pass laws requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration. He also pushed language aimed at the supposed threat to the Constitution and laws of the US from “Sharia law”; getting this language into the platform puts the GOP in position of endorsing a ludicrous far-right conspiracy theory. Kobach hopes that will give activists a tool for pressuring more states to pass their own anti-Sharia laws. In the platform committee, he backed Perkins’ efforts to maintain the strongest language against marriage equality. Even an amendment to the marriage section saying that everyone should be treated “equally under the law” as long as they are not hurting anyone else, was shot down by Kobach. Kobach also claims he won support for a provision to oppose any effort to limit how many bullets can go into a gun’s magazine.
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Hodai ITT:
One of the “brightest minds” that Pearce sought out was Kris Kobach. Kobach served as an advisor to former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, helping to implement the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System that called for the monitoring of individuals from Middle Eastern nations. Kobach is currently running for Kansas secretary of state and proudly bills himself on his campaign website as an attorney who “litigates against the ACLU in courts across the country.”
Kobach is also the “national expert on constitutional law” at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), a subsidiary organization of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). IRLI and FAIR are both funded in part by the Pioneer Fund, an organization that unabashedly studies the ‘science’ of eugenics. Consequently, the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated both IRLI and FAIR “nativist hate groups”—a designation that Pearce has no qualms in dismissing.
“The Center for Poverty [sic] is the closest thing you can get to a Communist organization in America,” says Pearce. “They are absolutely a hate-based organization that hates Americans who stand up for the rule of law.” For his part, Kobach says that being labeled as a racist, a nativist or a member of any hate group is “absurd and hurtful.”
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Five Things to Know About the Romney Advisor Responsible for Arizona’s Illegal Attack on Immigrants
By Ian Millhiser
It’s time to get to know Kris Kobach, the author of Arizona’s SB1070 law and Romney immigration advisor, whose work was largely gutted by the Supreme Court on Monday. Unfortunately the one portion upheld by the Court may still encourage racial profiling by Arizona police during traffic stops and other minor infractions. Codifying racial profiling is essential to Kobach’s long-term strategy of “attrition through enforcement”. But just who is Kris Kobach and what does he really believe?
Here are the top five things you should really know about Kobach,
1. He works for an arm of a racist hate group whose stated purpose is to reduce the number of people of color in the United States. Kris Kobach is of counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group. Kobach’s boss at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, Michael Hethmon, openly argues that the United States’s transition to a country where the majority of its citizens are people of color will lead to violence. And the founder of Federation for American Immigration Reform, John Tanton wrote, “I‘ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority and a clear one at that.”
2. He is virulently anti-gay. Kobach uses divisive politics and has grouped gays and lesbians together with pedophiles. During his 2004 run for Congress, Kobach accused the a leading gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, of promoting “homosexual pedophilia” in an attempt to smear his opponent.
3. He’s birther-curious**. In his run for Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach raised the question of whether President Barack Obama’s “short-form” birth certificate was sufficient to prove his citizenship. Later, when called on it, Kobach backtracked and said that he believed in the president’s citizenship but still maintained that questioning his birth certificate was valid.
4. He’scashing in. When Kobach takes his anti-immigrant show on the road, he makes a pile of money representing local communities, often running up huge bills. Kobach co-wrote anti-immigrant laws across the country from Farmer’s Branch, Texas to Fremont, Nebraska to Prince William County, Virginia toHazelton, Pennsylvania to Valley Park, Missouri to Arizona and Alabama. Kobach’s efforts have netted him more than $6.6 million in legal fees. And while serving as Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach appeared on out-of-state media at least 101 times in just one year, with an astonishing 31 appearances just on Lou Dobbs’ shows.
5. He’s anti-democracy. Kobach ran for Kansas chief elections officer on a flimsy voter fraud platform. Using non-existent cases of alleged voter fraud as an excuse, Kobach pushed a law that will disenfranchise thousands of Kansans. He claimed that his voter ID law does not suppress the vote of citizens and especially minority citizens when in reality the opposite is true. After getting this law passed, Kobach resisted efforts necessary to make it possible for citizens who lacked an ID to get one for free, as the law required.
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“I live in Farmers Branch, Texas. As a former city council person, I have closely followed our city’s anti-immigration fight since the beginning.
I have researched Kris Kobach, who was mentioned the first time this issue came up. Our mayor said he was an expert in immigration law who would help the city on a pro bono basis. I have requested copies of all the legal bills the city has accrued since the start of litigation in 2007. We will have paid almost $4 million in legal fees at the end of this fiscal year (Sept 30, 2010).
Mr. Kobach was paid $100,000 of that. So much for pro bono. Kobach is closely connected with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), whose agenda is to use cities and states to test out their immigration legislation to see if it is constitutional.
Both of our city’s ordinances were written by Kobach and both were ruled unconstitutional. I believe our city’s taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill for the benefit of a national organization that is never mentioned in any discussion of the issue.
… What is really frustrating…is that this fight has really changed the atmosphere of our town. We’ve always had a small-town feel and this issue has destroyed it. It has ruined our reputation. I’ve never seen such hateful rhetoric. We are now known worldwide as a racist city and it has effected our economic development. I’m embarrassed to say I’m from Farmers Branch.”
(Email unchanged from publication here.)
Unlike Russell Pearce and State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), unlike FAIR and its racist founder John Tanton, and unlike the whole of the John Tanton Network, it would seem that some of those who’ve seen Kobach’s work up close are less than impressed.