Amid racial protests, Kansas AG wants to revive Kobach’s racist voter registration law

With protests against police brutality toward people of color going on across the country, what a perfect time to try and revivify former Kansas secretary of state and Republican U.S Senate candidate Kris Kobach’s racist proof-of-citizenship voter registration law.

Perfect, that is, if Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt’s purpose is to spare no effort to reinforce his party’s obsession with and hostility toward the people whose work in many essential jobs, including in nursing homes and the meatpacking industry, we could not do without. In the middle of a global pandemic is also a perfect time to remind people how hard the Kansas GOP has worked at voter suppression, and how steadfastly they’ve fought any proposal that would make it easier for anyone to cast a ballot.

Though it’s never a bad time to seek attention or gin up an already ginned base, Schmidt may be trying extra hard in this election year. And is this in part a panicked response to all of those Kansans who are signing up to vote by mail in the fall? Who knows where a record turnout could lead.

The state law, which requires residents to offer proof of citizenship when they register to vote, was as you probably recall — and Kansans should remember, since they paid for it — already struck down by lower courts. Yet here comes Kansas asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on it.

Schmidt’s request that the Supreme Court take up this case is also bound to remind Kansans that Kobach, who defended the law himself in court two years ago, embarrassed himself so badly that the judge sent him back to take a remedial law school class. But then, maybe that’s all part of Schmidt’s plan, too, just ahead of the crowded August primary.

Kobach never proved that voter fraud was a problem in Kansas, because it isn’t. Two years ago, Judge Julie Robinson ruled that the 2011 law “disproportionately impacts duly qualified registration applicants, while only nominally preventing non-citizen voter registration.”

After the law went into effect in 2013, the court found, it disenfranchised some 35,000 legitimate voters, most of whom simply didn’t have the right documents with them when they tried to register. It uncovered just a few cases of potential voter fraud.

Even as the country’s one secretary of state with the ability to prosecute such cases, Kobach located only 43 non-citizens out of the 1.8 million Kansas voters who had registered to vote in the state since 1999. Just 11 of those people actually cast a ballot, and Robinson found those were “largely explained by administrative error, confusion, or mistake.” What Kobach persists even now in seeing as “the tip of an iceberg” of massive voter fraud, Robinson concluded was “only an icicle.”

Now that disgraceful legacy lives on, thanks to Derek Schmidt.