Despite the fact that widespread non-citizen voting doesn’t exist (as highlighted by Speaker Mike Johnson himself, after being unable to show the receipts when pressed for proof), House Republicans last month passed the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. This bill purports to ensure election integrity, but in reality it is nothing more than a figleaf to provide further legitimacy to election denial conspiracies and create new barriers that would actually make it harder for eligible Americans to vote.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee has called for attaching it to a spending bill or another must-pass bill, but this would be fundamentally dangerous for all Americans. We’ve already seen the disastrous results of xenophobic and voter suppression bills in numerous states – and notorious anti-immigrant zealot Kris Kobach, the current attorney general of Kansas, has been at the center of some of the worst and costliest measures.
Kobach came to national prominence as the architect of the abhorrent “self-deportation” platform that many say led to Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat and for his connections to some of the worst-of-the-worst anti-immigrant zealots (disgraced former sheriff Joe Arpaio and racist former Congressman Steve King ring a bell for anyone?). But he was also an early champion of the lie that voter fraud is rampant and requires harsh legislation – much like House Republicans are doing with the SAVE Act.
America’s Voice Senior Research Director Zachary Mueller previously detailed Kobach’s strict voter ID law, its repercussions on eligible voters, and the ensuing trial finding the law unlawful. During the proceedings, an expert witness testified that more than 30,000 Kansans had been blocked by the law through 2016. Mueller:
Kobach’s Kansas law required documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) in order to register to vote. The requirement makes it nearly impossible to conduct voter registration drives and can prevent would-be eligible voters from registering. Just this month, DPOC was found unconstitutional by U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU in Fish v. Kobach, after Kobach was only able to demonstrate 11 cases of voter fraud in Kansas from the last 18 years. Robinson wrote that DPOC did not help to block voter fraud, but “acted as a deterrent to registration and voting for substantially more eligible Kansans than it has prevented ineligible voters from registering to vote.”
Among them was Wichita State University professor T.J. Boynton, who was told when he went to vote that he was not on the list despite having his birth certificate on him when he registered at the Department of Motor Vehicle office. While he filled out a provisional ballot, “at least a month passed after the election before he received a notice that he needed to provide proof-of-citizenship, which he took as notification that his vote had not been counted,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in 2018.
“Later in 2015, when he was at the motor vehicle office to replace his license, he was asked again whether he wanted to register to vote, TJ declined. ‘I thought it was futile to register’ at the motor vehicle office, he said, ‘because I had tried to before and it didn’t work.’”
Remember, Kobach had campaigned for state secretary of state based on the fiction “that voter fraud was happening at an alarming rate all over Kansas,” the Brennan Center for Justice said in 2017. “The sitting Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh — himself a Republican — responded during the campaign, noting there was ‘no evidence’ to support Kobach’s claims.” Not only was Kobach cynically using this fiction to politically benefit himself and cost Americans their rights in the process, but he was also really bad at his job. Mueller continues:
The trial led to a lot of legal missteps and trouble for Kobach. Before the trial even began, Kobach was $1,000 fined for a “pattern” of “misleading the Court” after he initially refused to hand over documents pertinent to the case. It later came out that Kobach paid this fine using taxpayer money and a state-paid credit card. During the trial, Robinson held Kobach in contempt of court after he failed to fully comply with the preliminary injunction that required Kobach to fully register voters who lacked DPOC. She ordered Kobach to pay a $26,000 fine, which critics have said should come out of Kobach’s pocket rather than the Kansas treasury. In her final ruling, Robinson ordered Kobach to remedial legal school after his performance showed a lack of understanding of civil procedure.
How embarrassing – and Kobach should be ashamed. But, like his fellow corrupt GOP AG, Ken Paxton, who also got sent to remedial legal courses by a judge, Kobach is shameless.
He also left a trail of ruin in states where, with support from white nationalist John Tanton’s anti-immigrant network, “Kobach wrote bills that prohibited landlords from renting to immigrants, forced police to help deport them, demanded utilities stop serving them, implemented random and racist ID checks, and more,” Mueller continued. “When his laws were found unconstitutional, the localities he worked with were left with huge legal bills.” Legal fees ranged from $270,000 in Valley Park, Missouri, to more than $6 million in Farmers Branch, Texas, a small town of roughly 30,000 people.
These are wildly expensive costs for a problem that doesn’t exist because noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal and “vanishingly rare,” as the Brennan Center noted. When Johnson was asked for proof to back up the need for legislation like the SAVE Act during a press briefing in May, he responded that “the answer is that it’s unanswerable … We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable.” To put it more succinctly: I got nothing.
But despite the lack of evidence on their side, Republican state legislatures are entertaining baseless election denial conspiracies, adding redundant rules against non-citizen voting to the November ballot.
“Make no mistake, false and misleading information about our election system is being presented by Congress in an attempt to undermine voter confidence ahead of November,” the League of Women Voters said following the GOP House hearing last month. “This is just another attempt to spread misinformation about our democratic systems and to sow distrust in our elections.” Adav Noti, executive director of Campaign Legal Center, said “self-interested politicians are trying to undermine trust in the electoral process. Noncitizen voting simply does not occur at any meaningful level. It’s a fabrication being peddled, for personal and political gain, by leaders who should know better.”
Experts Debunk Right-Wing False Claims about Non-Citizen Voting, Disinformation, and the SAVE Act
Kris Kobach, Already Ordered to Remedial Law Classes, Faces Even More Legal Challenges
