Despite his claims of millions of illegal voters and his supporters’ belief that California and New York are not a part of the U.S., Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, fair and square. In fact, some of the most egregious examples of voter fraud in 2016 were by his own supporters. But that still hasn’t stopped the historically unpopular puppet—er, president—from reportedly setting up a “commission on election integrity” that will feature Kris “Papers, Please” Kobach, the noted bigot who has been Kansas’s secretary of state since 2011.
During Trump’s presidential transition, some had speculated that Kobach himself had floated his own name in a bid to become the nation’s attorney general—we ended up with America’s most racist Keebler elf, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, instead. But Kobach has his own disgusting rap sheet targeting voters from communities of color, and that history is precisely why he keeps orbiting the Trump White House. From immigrant rights group America’s Voice:
- Before Mike Pence’s selection, Kobach was endorsed as a Vice-Presidential pick for Trump by the nativist group VDARE. SPLC describes VDARE as a hate group for regularly publishing writing by white nationalists and anti-Semites, and was named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born in the Americas to English settlers.
- Kobach is a former employee and ongoing ally of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of FAIR – an organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
- Kobach was the architect of Arizona’s SB1070, the infamous anti-Latino, anti-immigrant “show me your papers” law, which was later ruled mostly unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. Immediately after the Court’s decision, Kobach filed “an anti-DACA suit on behalf of 10 ICE agents and Mississippi, alleging that they were being harmed by DACA. The case was dismissed in 2015 on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to bring the case in the first place.”
- In 2014, Kobach moaned that President Barack Obama’s 2014 executive actions on immigration would lead to “socialism” and “ethnic cleansing”.
- Last year, Kobach was a featured speaker at a conference organized by white nationalists. The Writers’ Workshop “is the brainchild of white nationalist and founder of the organized anti-immigrant movement, John Tanton”.
- Also earlier this year, Kobach was skewered for giving false information on the Spanish-language version of his website that could have possibly led to disenfranchisement of Latino voters. A simple mistake, we’re sure.
If Cruella de Vil ever came to life and decided to stop skinning Dalmatians in order to pursue a life in state or national politics, she would be Kris Kobach. This evil motherfucker’s pathetic excuse for a career has been nothing more than a racist mission to stop as many black and brown voters as possible from voting:
Kobach is the elected official behind one of the most egregious examples of voter suppression, disproportionately harmful to people of color. The ACLU sued in 2014, saying that “around 14 percent of all Kansans who have tried to register to vote since the state’s proof of citizenship law went into effect in 2013 have been stymied”. Kobach suffered a resounding defeat when “a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia blocked Kansas and two other states from requiring voters to show proof of citizenship if they register to vote using the federal form.”
“Kris Kobach being named to run a commission on ‘voter integrity’ is like naming Bernie Madoff to run a commission on financial crimes,” said America’s Voice executive director Frank Sharry. “Any commission which Kobach leads has no integrity.” Fact. So when advocates who have been following this guy for years tell you that he represents a threat to democracy, believe them.