Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach just might be the single-most racist politician in America today. For years, he’s dedicated himself to racist causes. In 2010, he helped Arizona craft the controversial S.B. 1070 law, which allowed law enforcement to demand proof of U.S. citizenship on the spot for any person of color or anyone with a “foreign accent.” If people were unable to provide it on the spot, police had the ability to arrest and indefinitely detain the individual and any family members traveling with them who also might not be able to provide documentation on the spot. The Koch-funded ALEC organization quickly pushed their bought and paid for state legislatures to introduce similar laws nationwide.
Kobach has also openly associated with white nationalists and you can read more about his deplorable background here.
Now Kobach is running for governor of Kansas, locked in heated contest with Democrat Laura Kelly, who has been endorsed by every living former governor of Kansas, Republican and Democrat alike, with the exception of one: Sam Brownback. Moderate Republicans are pushing for voters to reject Kris Kobach because of his extremism, racism and partisan handling of elections. His dirty tricks put him over his opponent in the Republican primary earlier this year by roughly one hundred votes.
Now Kobach and his Kansas allies aim to do it again in the general election. Case in point: Dodge City, Kansas. With a population of 27,000, Dodge City has seen a demographic change in the last two decades and the city’s Hispanic population now makes up roughly 60 percent of the total population. Kris Kobach really does not want them to vote. Ford County Clerk Debbie Cox closed the one and only polling location in Dodge City and moved it out of town, nearly a mile from the nearest bus stop.
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Rachel Maddow sent a crew to take a look at the so-called heavy construction that *required* them to move the polling location and look what they found:
After word began to spread about the apparently blatant plan to suppress the vote in Dodge City, the ACLU got involved. They asked Ford County Clerk Debbie Cox to at least publicize a voter help line and welp:
After the ACLU objected to Dodge City’s single, out-of-town polling place, the local official in charge of elections forwarded to the state an ACLU letter asking her to publicize a voter help line.
“LOL,” she wrote in an email to Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office.
Suppressing the vote is a game to these people. American ideals and constitutional rights be damned, for them it is a win at all costs attitude.
And for what it’s worth, Kris Kobach is also a driving force in the idea that people born in the United States don’t automatically have birthright citizenship. He appeared on CNN last night where commentator Jeffrey Toobin outright accused Kobach of being a racist and Kobach’s reaction was priceless. Hats off to Jeffrey Toobin for calling him our so directly.