I don’t live in Kansas so my interest here is academic. Like so many of the reality based lunatic fringe, I am continually frustrated by the inability of media interviewers to nail them down on anything.
I have always wanted to force one of these clowns to defend a specious argument on the record, but the press does not have either the fortitude, the intelligence or the force of law it takes to get a straight answer.
Finally, in the voter registration trial now being conducted in Kansas, a sharp lawyer confronts a prominent spokesperson for voter suppression, and forces him to basically admit to being a fraud with nothing to contribute to the argument.
I’m paraphrasing.
Not many links, most point to the same Kansas City Star article, but there is one other from the Courthouse News Service.
An excerpt.
Von Spakovsky confirmed that he disagrees with most legal scholars that a person automatically becomes a U.S. citizen if he or she is born on U.S. soil under the 14th Amendment, saying that his interpretation is that at least one parent must also be a citizen.
Von Spakovsky testified that even a small number of non-citizens on voter rolls “could make the difference in a race that's decided by a small number of votes,” but during cross-examination acknowledged that he could not name a specific federal election that was decided by non-citizen votes.
Von Spakovsky wrote the 2012 book “Who's Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.”
Ho asked him if his research for that book was peer-reviewed or whether he had ever written a peer-reviewed article on voter fraud.
"I'm not an academic, so I don't use the peer review process,” von Spakovsky replied.
In an intense series of questions throughout the afternoon, Ho questioned the validity of von Spakovsky’s studies and his testimony as an expert witness. One such time was when Ho asked if von Spakovsky recognized other experts in the field of noncitizen registration.
“I know about my expertise,” von Spakovsky said. “I’m not going to determine the expertise of others.”
Ho then played a video of von Spakovsky’s deposition from 2016 when he was asked the same question. In the video, von Spakovsky seemed hesitant to name other possible experts.
Reading a bit between the lines from the judge’s questions to the witness, it looks like Kobach will lose and that the emptiness of the voter fraud argument is about to be a matter of public record. This may be useful in other venues, so we should be grateful that it is being represented here by such inept clowns.