Kobach and Trump’s Spectacular Voter-Fraud Failure – By David Daley (Rolling Stone) / April 27 2020
As Trump makes new, unfounded claims about voter fraud and mail-in voting, it’s worth looking back on the colossal trainwreck of his administration’s first efforts to prove voter fraud
Excerpted from “Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy,” by David Daley. Published by Liveright, a division of WW Norton and Co. Copyright 2020. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Kris Kobach wears the aw-shucks smile of the star quarterback on prom night, naturally winning the approval of his date’s demanding father, the doors of power and privilege swinging wide. Just as he knew they would. Kobach’s enthusiastic beam says, “I belong here, never doubted it.”
It was November 20, 2016, just 12 days after Donald Trump’s surprise victory, and the Kansas secretary of state stood confidently alongside the president-elect at his exclusive New Jersey golf club, one of many gilded transition sanctums. Kobach had been exchanging emails with Gene Hamilton, the Trump transition official overseeing the administration’s immigration policy, plans for a Muslim travel ban and appointments to Homeland Security and Justice. In them, Kobach, the architect of the nation’s strictest voter-ID and anti-immigration measures, assured Hamilton that he had already begun writing amendments to the National Voter Registration Act that would “make clear that proof of citizenship requirements are permitted.” That day, he carried a brown leather portfolio case with one paper-clipped document visible. Cameras captured its title: “Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 Days.”
As the president makes new, unfounded claims about voter fraud and mail-in voting, it’s worth looking back on the colossal train wreck of his administration’s first efforts to prove voter fraud, a Kobach-led commission forced to close down without confirming a single example. It began that afternoon when Kobach took his place on the portico next to Trump, with the assembled international media looking on, Kobach’s view all flashbulbs, manicured lawns, a spectacular tiered fountain. The next president held his left arm on Kobach’s back, and with his right he pointed at him with a gesture that said, “Not me, this is the real man, this guy right here.”
Sure, the media, most academics, and election-law experts had mocked and dismissed Kobach’s claims about voter fraud, but Kobach pressed eternally forward, deaf to fact-checkers, as one can be when every media profile notes your degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford. At Bedminster, his ideas had gained currency at the center of power. Aides opened the giant white doors for the secretary of state and the president-elect. Kobach beheld the staircase where Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner took their wedding photos, and entered a clubhouse where the initiation fee alone ran upward of $300,000. Anything must have seemed possible.
Continue to article: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kris-kobach-donald-trump-voter-fraud-myths-vote-suppression-990300/
