The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by Kansas Republicans to revive laws that require people to prove their citizenship before voting.
The law, which a Kansas district court struck down in 2018, was instituted in 2013 and required voters to present a passport, birth certificate, or other proof of citizenship before registering. It had been championed by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, whom President Trump appointed in 2017 to head up the commission studying election integrity in the 2016 election.
At the time of the law’s passage, it ran up against critics who alleged that it was designed to disenfranchise potential voters. The American Civil Liberties Union in 2016 filed a lawsuit, noting that Kansas was the only state that required such strict voter registration requirements. The advocacy group claimed that more than 30,000 people had lost the right to vote during the time that the law was in effect.
Kansas District Court Chief Judge Julie Robinson, in her 2018 opinion striking the law down, wrote that it “disproportionately impacted duly qualified registration applicants, while only nominally preventing non-citizen voter registration.” Robinson also found Kobach in contempt of court for his actions throughout the proceedings.
Kansas appealed to the Supreme Court after earlier this year the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the Kansas District Court’s ruling.
Trump in 2018 shut down the commission over which he had placed Kobach. Despite pushing hard for voter identification laws and claiming that many elections were “rigged,” Trump said that lack of state cooperation forced him to disband the effort.
“Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” Trump said during a press conference at the White House.
The Supreme Court’s order comes just days after it issued an order rejecting a case in which Texas, along with Trump, raised allegations that the relaxation of voting regulations caused massive fraud in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia.
