The New York Times has labeled Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach a “zealot” because of his support for voter ID laws, and the paper’s editorial board also went so far as to compare him to the draconian lawman in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
Kobach’s “extremist positions” on immigration, gun controls and same-sex marriage make him one of the most “fervid ideologues” of his party, the board wrote Monday.
But that’s not what makes him a real “zealot,” they added. It’s his support for voter ID laws, including a “devious, 11th-hour policy” to bulk up Kansas’ own handling of the matter.
The board wrote:
“At issue is Mr. Kobach’s zealous enforcement of a notorious law he urged Kansas Republicans to pass that requires new voters to prove their citizenship with a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers,” the board wrote. “Federal law imposes no such burden. But Mr. Kobach continues to try to force the state requirement onto the books — brazenly persisting in the face of recent federal and state court findings that these legitimate voters are being suppressed and must be allowed their full ballot rights.”
“Nevertheless, Mr. Kobach, claiming the issue is unsettled while he appeals to higher courts, has ordered election officials to count the ballot choices for federal offices from the 17,000 disputed voters but ignore their state and local choices in the coming primary contests. He obviously timed this bit of contumely so that any rulings on appeals would be unlikely before this summer’s voting.”
The board said an appellate court should intercede and reject Kobach’s efforts, and said the notion of “voter cheating” is a “myth.”
Kobach “has utterly failed to document [voter fraud], despite his Javert-like zealotry as secretary of state,” the board wrote. “In fact, the federal ruling against him said there was evidence of only three instances across 18 years in which noncitizens voted in Kansas.”
Worse than disenfranchising Kansas voters, they continued, is the fact that Kobach has a voice in shaping the Republican Party’s platform. He helped co-author the party’s immigration platform, which the Times labelled “hard-edged.”
The paper also referred to the GOP’s immigration policy as being focused on presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump’s “hateful fantasy of a wall that the plank trumpets ‘must cover the entirety of the southern border.'”
“Mr. Kobach’s performance as Kansas’ secretary of state clearly is a blight on true democracy,” it added. “But don’t expect the delegates at Donald Trump’s convention to shun him.”
