You have to feel some sympathy for the people of Kansas. They are so screwed. Their leaders created the perfect Republican state, one in which they provided tax breaks for the wealthy and repealed taxes for 100,000 businesses. In addition:
They tightened welfare requirements, privatized the delivery of Medicaid, cut $200 million from the education budget, eliminated four state agencies and 2,000 government employees.
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after signing the largest tax cut in Kansas history, Brownback told the Wall Street Journal, “My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, 'See, we've got a different way, and it works.' "
Indeed. The problem is that it has worked very badly. Last month, the state budget director announced that:
the new projections put Kansas nearly a quarter of a billion dollars short over the next two years.
For coverage of how deeply the state of Kansas is screwed, check out Chris Reeves’ blog on Daily Kos. In addition to Brownback and the other Kansas political leadership, Chris has been covering Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s many nefarious activities here, here, here, and here.
Kris Kobach is the man behind Arizona’s “papers, please” law and appears to suffer from a tremendous fear that undocumented immigrants will meet up in Kansas, take over the government, and run the state into the ground, leaving it broke or something. In other words—competition.
In 2011, Kansas passed a Kobach-written voter ID law that included a requirement for documentary evidence of citizenship in order to register to vote. That went into effect in 2013 which, coincidentally, was right after the Supreme Court struck down a similar law in Arizona.
Undeterred, Kobach proceeded to purge the voter list and has suspended the registrations of 37,000 Kansans; 90 percent of said suspensions were due to lack of citizenship documentation.
He sued the EAC (Elections Assistance Commission) for its repeated refusal to include Kansas’ documentation requirement on the federal voter registration form. Currently the form only requires that the applicant attest to his/her citizenship under penalty of perjury. Kobach won his case in Kansas.
But the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled against him and the Supreme Court refused to take Kobach’s appeal, meaning the state has to “accept and use” the federal form as required by federal law.
Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that there was a time, and it wasn’t too long ago, when our government actually encouraged people to register to vote by making it as easy and convenient as possible.
Voter turnout for the 1988 election was less than 50 percent, the lowest rate since 1948. Believing that making voter registration easier would result in more voters turning out for elections, multiple bills were introduced in Congress to eliminate the restrictions on registration that lingered after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. President Clinton signed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), which became familiarly known as the motor-voter law and allowed voters to register when they got a driver’s license, or when they dealt with certain other government agencies, regardless of their state of residence.
Between 1992 and 2012, the percentage of the voting eligible population that was registered to vote went from 75.75 percent to 86.35 percent.
In 2000, the presidential election (which was finally decided by the Supreme Court in a controversial decision) exposed voting irregularities, especially during the recount of a few districts in Florida. It was from the recount that we learned all about hanging chads and the advantages of astro-turfing as evidenced by the Brooks Brothers Riot. Oh, and butterfly ballots.
Congress again took action, and passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) which ...
… created the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent, bipartisan agency to carry out grant programs, provide for testing and certification of voting systems, study election issues, and assist election officials by issuing guidelines and other guidance for voting systems and implementation of the act’s requirements;
By 2014, the EAC had distributed $3.28 billion to states to improve their voting systems and to replace the old lever and punchcard ballots. The EAC is a non-partisan commission, which consists of four commissioners—two Republicans and two Democrats. Between December 2011 and January 2015, there were no commissioners. The Senate finally approved two Republican and one Democratic commissioner in January 2015. Currently there is another Democratic commissioner awaiting Senate confirmation. The day-to-day operations are carried out by the executive director and staff.
It was the executive director who decided not to amend the voter registration form (required by the NVRA and administered by the EAC) to include Kansas’ citizenship documentation requirement. The 10th Circuit Court in Denver found that she had acted in accordance with the limited authority that the commissioners had delegated to make decisions in line with established precedents. And since the commissioners had refused to amend the form when requested to do so by Arizona in 2006, the executive director acted appropriately in rejecting Kobach’s request.
In November 2015, the EAC hired a new executive director. By January 2016, the new executive director reversed the course of the EAC and approved the changes to the voter registration form requested by Kris Kobach.
The new executive director is Brian Newby who served as the Johnson County Election Commissioner. In Kansas. He was reappointed by none other than Secretary of State Kris Kobach. And according to an Associated Press report, Kobach helped Newby get his new job with the EAC. An email and documents provided to the AP reveal the ties between the two men.
As a finalist for the job of executive director, Newby said in a June email to his benefactor, Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, that he was friends with two of the commissioners at the federal agency, and told Kobach: “I think I would enter the job empowered to lead the way I want to.”
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"I wanted you in the loop, in part because of other issues in the past with the EAC," Newby emailed Kobach. "I also don't want you thinking that you can't count on me in an upcoming period that will tax our resources.
And if that were not enough, Newby is under investigation by the Johnson County district attorney as a result of a recent audit of Newby’s performance as the Johnson County election commissioner.
The review by the county auditor found that in Newby's previous job he intentionally skirted oversight of government credit card expenses, improperly claimed mileage and travel expenses, and wasted taxpayer funds. Auditors found Newby used the government card of the assistant commissioner, in effect allowing him to approve most of his own expenditures rather than submit them to the county manager.
More on those wasted taxpayer funds from Roxana Hegeman of the Associated Press:
Among the questionable expenditures was more than $18,000 that county taxpayers spent for a conference in Kansas City. Documents obtained through open records requests show it was organized by Newby and all three federal commissioners spoke at that conference, which was in September while Newby was under consideration for the job.
Objections have been raised to his unilateral change of the registration form, including one by the vice chair of the EAC, and lone Democrat, Thomas Hicks. He ...
… wrote that Newby had acted “unilaterally,” and that his decision “contradicts policy and precedent established by the Commission.” Hicks noted that a 2015 EAC statement makes clear that the executive director lacks the authority to set policy, which must be done by the commissioners. Hicks said any change to the federal voter registration form would need to be voted on by the commissioners after a public comment period, neither of which occurred in this case.
A group of activists led by the League of Women Voters have brought suit against Brian Newby and the EAC, claiming that his action will hurt voter registration efforts and disenfranchise eligible voters in the November general election. They want the court to block the change to the federal voter registration form.
“This change was unauthorized and illegal, and is hugely detrimental to voters in Alabama, Georgia, and Kansas,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy program which is representing the League in the lawsuit. “With presidential primaries fast approaching, these citizens deserve clarity on how —or if — they can register to vote.”
The Brennan Center looked into voting fraud in 2007. They gave short shrift to claims of voting by non-citizens:
We are not aware of any documented cases in which individual noncitizens have either intentionally registered to vote or voted while knowing that they were ineligible. Given that the penalty (criminal prosecution and deportation) is so severe, and the payoff (one incremental vote) is so minimal for any individual voter, it makes sense that extremely few noncitizens would attempt to vote, knowing that doing so is illegal.
However, we’ve yet to see a single individual of Kobach’s ilk that has ever been susceptible to sense. And while what Kobach and Brownback have been able to accomplish in Kansas may give some non-Kansas residents smug satisfaction at living elsewhere, the problem with Republicans is that they are very good at infiltrating our governing bureaucracies in order to get what they want. And they are spreading their influence by infiltrating agencies that most Americans have never heard of—like the Elections Assistance Commission.
By the way, Kris Kobach—who is also the mind behind Mitt Romney’s self-deportation program—has endorsed Donald Trump.