The Head of Trump's Voter Fraud Commission Just Showed How Low He'd Go to Keep Citizens from Voting

Kris Kobach is perhaps best known as the head of the failed "voter fraud commission." That would be the body set up by Donald Trump to find evidence for his delusional claims that millions of fraudulent votes went to Hillary Clinton. Of course, in the commission's brief existence it failed to find any proof, because voter fraud isn't so much "real" as it is a "lie that Republicans use to keep poor, minority, or probably-left-leaning voters from voting."

But Kobach is no doubt fully aware of that. He's currently the secretary of state for Kansas, where he helped push one of the strictest voting ID laws in the country. It's expected to have disenfranchised 18,000 people in that state who tried to register after the "Documentary Proof of Citizenship" law went into effect. The ACLU challenged the law and in early 2016 a judge ruled that Kobach couldn't enforce it until after the trial (which is still pending). But that's not how Kobach saw things, per the New York Times:

A law went into effect in Kansas in 2013 that required proof of citizenship to register to vote, one of the strictest such laws in the country. But in May 2016, Mr. Kobach lost a challenge to the law brought by the A.C.L.U., and [U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson] ordered him to notify people who had tried to register while renewing or applying for a driver’s license that they were indeed eligible to vote.

Judge Robinson wrote in the ruling on Wednesday that those voters should have received postcards with information telling them of their polling place and their registration status, but Mr. Kobach did not ensure that the postcards were sent. “The Court is troubled by Defendant’s failure to take responsibility for violating this Court’s orders, and for failing to ensure compliance over an issue that he explicitly represented to the Court had been accomplished,” the judge wrote.

But Kobach, who's currently running for the Republican nomination for Kansas governor, couldn't be bothered to tell nearly 20,000 people in Kansas that they were actually allowed to vote in the 2016 presidential election, despite assuring a federal judge that he would. According to the Times, he didn't even take measures to fully update the Kansas secretary of state website. Now, he's in contempt of court and is obligated to reimburse the ACLU's legal fees.

With such relentless and deceitful opponents fighting against the right to vote, it's more important now that states work to expand voting rights rather than just fight to maintain what meager protections already exist. Last year, Oregon was the first state in the country to institute automatic voter registration through its DMVs, seeing a swell in voter turn out as a result. This week, New Jersey became the twelfth state since Oregon to pass similar laws.

And yet, it shouldn't surprise anyone that Kobach refused to follow the court's orders. He's shown that his primary motive in public life is to make sure that as few Americans as possible can vote, even if he has to repeatedly mislead courts to do it. And there's plenty of evidence that this strategy works: just last week, a Republican official in Wisconsin bragged in a radio interview that repressive voter ID laws successfully handed the state to Trump.